Month: November 2019

What to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: scientists hard at work

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Biomedical technician Louis Pinedo feeds stem cells their special diet. Photo by Cedars-Sinai.

With Thanksgiving and Black Friday approaching in the next couple of days, we wanted to give thanks to all the scientists hard at work during this holiday weekend. Science does not sleep–the groundbreaking research and experiments that are being conducted do not take days off. There are tasks in the laboratory that need to be done daily otherwise months, even years, of important work can be lost in an instant.

Below is a story from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that talks about one of these scientists, Louis Pinedo, that will be working during this holiday weekend.

Stem Cells Don’t Take the Day Off on Thanksgiving

Inside a Cedars-Sinai Laboratory, Where a Scientist Will be Busy Feeding Stem Cells During the Holiday

While most of us are stuffing ourselves with turkey and pumpkin pie at home on Thanksgiving Day, the staff at one Cedars-Sinai laboratory will be on the job, feeding stem cells.

“Stem cells do not observe national holidays,” says Loren Ornelas-Menendez, the manager of a lab that converts samples of adult skin and blood cells into stem cells—the amazing “factories” our bodies use to make our cells. These special cells help medical scientists learn how diseases develop and how they might be cured.

Stem cells are living creatures that must be hand-fed a special formula each day, monitored for defects and maintained at just the right temperature. And that means the cell lab is staffed every day, 52 weeks a year.

These cells are so needy that Ornelas-Menendez jokes: “Many people have dogs. We have stem cells.”

Millions of living stem cells are stored in the David and Janet Polak Foundation Stem Cell Core Laboratory at the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute. Derived from hundreds of healthy donors and patients, they represent a catalogue of human ills, including diabetes, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Crohn’s disease.

Cedars-Sinai scientists rely on stem cells for many tasks: to make important discoveries about how our brains develop; to grow tiny versions of human tissues for research; and to create experimental treatments for blindness and neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that they are testing in clinical trials.

The lab’s main collection consists of induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPSCs, which mimic the all-powerful stem cells we all had as embryos. These ingenious cells, which Cedars-Sinai scientists genetically engineer from adult cells, can make any type of cell in the body—each one matching the DNA of the donor. Other types of stem cells in the lab make only one or two kinds of cells, such as brain or intestinal cells.

Handy and versatile as they are, stem cells are high-maintenance. A few types, such as those that make connective tissue cells for wound healing, can be fed as infrequently as every few days. But iPSCs require a daily meal to stay alive, plus daily culling to weed out cells that have started to turn into cells of the gut, brain, breast or other unwanted tissues.

So each day, lab staff suit up and remove trays of stem cells from incubators that are set at a cozy 98.6 degrees. Peering through microscopes, they carefully remove the “bad” cells to ensure the purity of the iPSCs they will provide to researchers at Cedars-Sinai and around the world.

While the cells get sorted, a special feeding formula is defrosting in a dozen bottles spread around a lab bench. The formula incudes sodium, glucose, vitamins and proteins. Using pipettes, employees squeeze the liquid into food wells inside little compartments that contain the iPSCs. Afterward, they return the cells to their incubators.

The lab’s 10 employees are on a rotating schedule that ensures the lab is staffed on weekends and holidays, not just weekdays. On Thanksgiving Day this year, biomedical technician Louis Pinedo expects to make a 100-mile round trip from his home in Oxnard, California, to spend several hours at work, filling nearly 600 feeding wells. On both Christmas and New Year’s Day, two employees are expected to staff the lab.

All this ceaseless effort helps make Cedars-Sinai one of the world’s top providers of iPSCs, renowned for consistency and quality. Among the lab’s many clients are major universities and the global Answer ALS project, which is using the cells in its search for a cure for this devastating disease.

That’s why the lab’s director, Dhruv Sareen, PhD, suggests that before you sit down to your Thanksgiving feast, why not lift a glass to these hard-working lab employees?

“One day the cells they tend could lead to treatments for diseases that have plagued humankind for centuries,” he says. “And that’s something to be truly thankful for.”

The Most Important Gift of All

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Photo courtesy American Hospital Association

There are many players who have a key role in helping make a stem cell therapy work. The scientists who develop the therapy, the medical team who deliver it and funders like CIRM who provide the money to make this all happen. But vital as they are, in some therapies there is another, even more important group; the people who donate life-saving organs and tissues for transplant and research.

Organ and tissue donation saves lives, increases knowledge of diseases, and allow for the development of novel medications to treat them. When individuals or their families authorize donation for transplant or medical research, they allow their loved ones to build a long-lasting legacy of hope that could not be accomplished in any other way.

Four of CIRM’s clinical trials involve organ donations – three kidney transplant programs (you can read about those here, here and here) and one targeting type 1 diabetes.

Dr. Nikole Neidlinger, the Chief Medical Officer with Donor Network West – the federally designated organ and tissue recovery organization for Northern California and Nevada – says it is important to recognize the critical contribution made in a time of grief and crisis by the families of deceased donors. 

“For many families who donate, a loved one has died, and they are in shock. Even so, they are willing to say yes to giving others a second chance at life and to help others to advance science. Without them, none of this would be possible. It’s the ultimate act of generosity and compassion.”

The latest CIRM-funded clinical trial involving donated tissue is with Dr. Peter Stock and his team at UCSF. They are working on a treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D), where the body’s immune system destroys its own pancreatic beta cells. These cells are necessary to produce insulin, which regulates blood sugar levels in the body.

In the past people have tried transplanting beta cells, from donated pancreatic islets, into patients with type 1 diabetes to try and reverse the course of the disease. However, this requires islets from multiple donors and the shortage of organ and tissue donors makes this difficult to do.

Dr. Stock’s clinical trial at UCSF aims to address these limitations.  He is going to transplant both pancreatic islets and parathyroid glands, from the same donor, into T1 patients. It’s hoped this combination approach will increase beta cell survival, potentially boosting long-term insulin production and removing the need for multiple donors.  And because the transplant is placed in the patient’s forearm, it makes it easier to monitor the effectiveness and accessibility of the islet transplants. Of equal importance, the development of this site will facilitate the transplantation of stem cell derived beta cells, which are very close to clinical application.

“As a transplant surgeon, it is an absolute privilege to be able to witness the life-saving organ transplants made possible by the selfless generosity of the donor families. It is hard to imagine how families have the will to think about helping others at a time of their greatest grief. It is this willingness to help others that restores my faith in humanity”

Donor Network West plays a vital role in this process. In 2018 alone, the organization recovered 702 donor samples for research. Thanks to the generosity of the donors/donor families, the donor network has been able to provide parathyroid and pancreas tissue essential to make this clinical trial a success”

“One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people and a tissue donor can heal more than 75 others,” says Dr. Neidlinger. “For families, the knowledge that they are transforming someone’s life, and possibly preventing another family from experiencing this same loss, can serve as a silver lining during their time of sorrow. .”

Organs that can be donated

Kidney (x2), Heart, Lungs (x2), Liver, Pancreas, Intestine

Tissue that can be donated

Corneas, Heart valves, Skin, Bone, Tendons, Cartilage, Veins

Currently, there are over 113,000 people in the U.S. waiting for an organ transplant, of which 84 % are in need of kidneys.  Sadly, 22 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant that does not come in time. The prospect of an effective treatment for type 1 diabetes means hope for thousands of people living with the chronic condition.

Machine learning used to pattern stem cells – a vital step in organ modeling

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Gladstone researchers discovered a method to control the patterns stem cells form in a dish. The work was led by Senior Investigator Todd McDevitt (left) and his team, including (pictured) David Joy and Ashley Libby.

When someone thinks of machine learning, the first thing that comes to mind might be the technology used by Netflix or Hulu to suggest new shows based on their viewing history. But what if this technology could be applied towards advancing the field of regenerative medicine?

Thanks to a CIRM funded study, a team of scientists lead by Dr. Todd McDevitt at the Gladstone Institutes have found a way to to use machine learning to control the spacial organization of stem cells, a key process that plays a vital role in organ development. This new understanding of how stem cells organize themselves in 3D is an important step towards being able to create functional and/or personalized organs for research or organ transplants.

“We’ve shown how we can leverage the intrinsic ability of stem cells to organize,” said Dr. McDevitt in a news release from Gladstone Institutes. “This gives us a new way of engineering tissues, rather than a printing approach where you try to physically force cells into a specific configuration.”

In their normal environment, stem cells are able to form patterns as they mature and over time morph into the tissues seen in an adult organism. One type of stem cell, called an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC), can become nearly every cell type of the body. In fact, researchers have already found ways to direct iPSCs to become various cell types such as those in the heart or brain.

Unfortunately, attempting to replicate the pattern formation of stem cells as they mature has been challenging. Some have used 3D printing to lay out stem cells in a desired shape, but the cells often migrated away from their initial locations.

In the same news release mentioned above, Ashley Libby, a graduate student at Gladstone and co-first author of this study, said that,

“Despite the importance of organization for functioning tissues, we as scientists have had difficulty creating tissues in a dish with stem cells. Instead of an organized tissue, we often get a disorganized mix of different cell types.”

To solve this problem, the scientists used a computational model to learn how to influence stem cells into forming new arrangements, such as those that might be useful in generating personalized organs.

Previous studies conducted by Dr. McDevitt showed that blocking the expression of two genes, called ROCK1 and CDH1, affected the layout of iPS cells grown in a petri dish.

In this current study, the scientists used CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing (you can read about this technology in more detail here) to block expression of ROCK1 and CDH1 at any time by adding a drug to the iPSCs. This was done to see if they could predict stem cell arrangement based on the alterations made to ROCK1 and CDH1 at different drug doses and time periods.

The team carried out various experiments with different doses and timing. Then, the data was input into a machine-learning program designed to identify patterns, something that could take a human months to identify.

(Left) video showing simulated interactions between different stem cell populations. (Right) image of stem cells grown in conditions dictated by the machine-learning program generate a colony that forms a bull’s-eye pattern, as predicted.

The machine-learning program used the data to predict ways that ROCK1 and CDH1 affect iPSC organization. The scientists then began to see whether the program could compute how to make entirely new patterns, like a bull’s-eye or an island of cells. The team says the results were little short of astounding. Machine learning was able to accurately predict conditions that will cause stem cell colonies to form desired patterns.

The full study was published in the journal Cell Systems.

Good news for two CIRM-supported therapies

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Jake Javier, a patient in the spinal cord injury stem cell therapy clinical trial

It’s always satisfying to see two projects you have supported for a long time do well. That’s particularly true when the projects in question are targeting conditions that have no other effective therapies.

This week we learned that a clinical trial we funded to help people with spinal cord injuries continues to show benefits. This trial holds a special place in our hearts because it is an extension of the first clinical trial we ever funded. Initially it was with Geron, and was later taken up by Asterias Biotherapeutics, which has seen been bought by Lineage Cell Therapeutics Inc.

The therapy involved transplanting oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs), which are derived from human embryonic stem cells, into people who suffered recent spinal cord injuries that left them paralyzed from the neck down.  OPCs play an important role in supporting and protecting nerve cells in the central nervous system, the area damaged in a spinal cord injury. It’s hoped the cells will help restore some of the connections at the injury site, allowing patients to regain some movement and feeling.

In a news release, Lineage said that its OPC therapy continues to report positive results, “where the overall safety profile of OPC1 has remained excellent with robust motor recovery in upper extremities maintained through Year 2 patient follow-ups available to date.”

Two years in the patients are all continuing to do well, and no serious unexpected side effects have been seen. They also reported:

– Motor level improvements

  1. Five of six Cohort 2 patients achieved at least two motor levels of improvement over baseline on at least one side as of their 24-month follow-up visit.
  2. In addition, one Cohort 2 patient achieved three motor levels of improvement on one side over baseline as of the patient’s 24-month follow-up visit; improvement has been maintained through the patient’s 36-month follow-up visit.

Brian M. Culley, CEO of Lineage Cell Therapeutics called the news “exciting”, saying “To put these improvements into perspective, a one motor level gain means the ability to move one’s arm, which contributes to the ability to feed and clothe oneself or lift and transfer oneself from a wheelchair. These are tremendously meaningful improvements to quality of life and independence.”

Evie, cured of SCID by a therapy licensed to Orchard Therapeutics

The other good news came from Orchard Therapeutics, a company we have partnered with on a therapy for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) also known as “bubble baby diseases” (we have blogged about this a lot including here).

In a news release Orchard announced that the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has granted an accelerated assessment for their gene therapy for metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD). This is a rare and often fatal condition that results in the build-up of sulfatides in the brain, liver, kidneys and other organs. Over time this makes it harder and harder for the person to walk, talk, swallow or eat.

Anne Dupraz-Poiseau, chief regulatory officer of Orchard Therapeutics, says this is testimony to the encouraging early results of this therapy. “We look forward to working with the EMA to ensure this potentially transformative new treatment, if approved, reaches patients in the EU as quickly as possible, and continuing our efforts to expand patient access outside the EU.”

The accelerated assessment potentially provides a reduced review timeline from 210 to 150 days, meaning it could be available to a wider group of patients sooner.  

What is IPEX syndrome? A deeper dive into a CIRM funded award

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Brian Lookofsky (left) and his son Taylor Lookofsky (right) at the CIRM Board meeting on October 31, 2019. Taylor is living with IPEX syndrome.

Last week we shared a powerful story of patient advocate Taylor Lookofsky, a young man with IPEX syndrome. In his speech, he talked about the impact the condition has had on his life. Taylor shared this speech a few weeks ago right after the CIRM Board awarded $5.53 million to Dr. Rosa Bacchetta for her work related to IPEX syndrome.

But this begs the question, what exactly is IPEX syndrome? What is the approach that Dr. Bacchetta is working on? For those of you interested in the deeper scientific dive, we will elaborate on this complex disease and promising approach.

IPEX syndrome is a rare disease that primarily affects males and is caused by a genetic mutation that leads to a lack of specialized immune cells called regulatory T cells (Tregs).

Without the presence of Tregs, a patient’s own immune cells attack the body’s own tissues and organs, a phenomenon known as autoimmunity.  This affects many different areas such as the intestines, skin, and hormone-producing glands and can be fatal in early childhood. 

Current treatment options include a bone marrow transplant and immune suppressing drugs.  However, immune suppression is only partially effective and can cause severe side effects while bone marrow transplants are limited due to lack of matching donors.

Dr. Rosa Bacchetta and her team at Stanford will take a patient’s own blood in order to obtain CD4+ T cells.  Then, using gene therapy, they will insert a normal version of the mutated gene into the CD4+ T cells, allowing them to function like normal Treg cells.  These Treg-like cells would then be reintroduced back into the patient, hopefully creating an IPEX-free blood supply and correcting the problem.

Furthermore, if successful, this treatment could be adapted for treatment of other autoimmune conditions where Treg cells are underlying problem.

The goal of this work is to complete the work necessary to conduct a clinical trial for IPEX syndrome.

What would you like to know about stem cell research? This is your chance to ask the experts.

/ Kevin McCormack / 4 Comments

There’s a lot of fiction, a lot of misinformation surrounding stem cells and stem cell research. There are claims that are not based on solid science and clinics that are offering so-called “treatments” that are unproven, even dangerous for patients. Now you have a chance to talk to the experts in the field and get solid answers from them about what’s working, what’s not, and how you can find a therapy that might be appropriate for you.

Do you have questions about the latest in research using stem cells to help people recovering from a stroke? We’ll have someone who can answer them.

Want to know if stem cells can help people battling cancer? Or what’s happening in finding a stem cell treatment for diabetes or sickle cell disease, even autism, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease? We’ll have experts to answers those.

This is all happening in a special Facebook Live “Ask the Stem Cell Team” event on Thursday, December 12th from 10.30am to 11.30am PDT. To take part all you have to do is tune in on the day and post a question or you can send us one ahead of time at info@cirm.ca.gov

We will do our best to answer as many of them as we can during the Facebook Live event, and those we don’t have time to get to we’ll answer in a blog at a later date.

So join us.

Transplanted stem cells used to grow fully functional lungs in mice

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Illustration of a human lung

According to organ donation statistics from the Health Resources & Services Administration, over 113,000 men, women, and children are on the national transplant waiting list as of July 2019. Another person is added to the waiting list every 10 minutes and 20 people die each day waiting for a transplant.

As these statistics highlight, there is a tremendous need for obtaining viable organs for people that are in need of a transplant. It is because of this, that scientists and researchers are exploring ways of using stem cells to potentially grow fully functional organs.

Dr. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, Stanford University

In a CIRM-supported study, Dr. Hiromitsu Nakauchi at Stanford University, in collaboration with Dr. Wellington Cardoso at Columbia University, were able to grow fully functional lungs in mouse embryos using transplanted stem cells. The full study, published in Nature Medicine, suggests that it may be possible to grow human lungs in animals and use them for patients in dire need of transplants or to study new lung treatments.

In the study, the researchers took stem cells and implanted them into modified mouse embryos that either lacked the stem cells necessary to form a lung or were not able to produce enough cells to make a lung. It was found that the implanted stem cells formed fully functional lungs that allowed the mice to live well into adulthood. Additionally, there were no signs of the mouse’s body rejecting the lung tissue composed of donor stem cells.

In a press release, Dr. Cardoso expressed optimism for the study and the potential the results hold:

“Millions of people worldwide who suffer from incurable lung diseases die without treatment due to the limited supply of donor lungs for transplantation. Our study shows that it may eventually be possible to develop new strategies for generating human lungs in animals for transplantation as an alternative to waiting for donor lungs.”

The challenges of living with IPEX

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Last week the CIRM Board awarded $5.53 million to Dr. Rosa Bacchetta at Stanford to complete the work necessary to conduct a clinical trial for IPEX syndrome. This is a rare disease caused by mutations in the FOXP3 gene which leaves people with the condition vulnerable to immune system attacks on their organs and tissues. These attacks can be devastating, even fatal.

At the Board meeting Taylor Lookofsky, a young man with IPEX syndrome, talked about the impact the condition has had on his life. The transcript of his talk is below.

It’s a powerful reminder that syndromes like this, because they affect a small number of people, are often overlooked and have few resources devoted to finding new treatments and cures. After reading Taylor’s story you come to appreciate his courage and determination, and why the funding CIRM provides is so important in helping researchers like Dr. Bacchetta find therapies to help people like Taylor.

Brian Lookofsky (Taylor’s father), Taylor Lookofsky and Dr. Rosa Bacchetta at the CIRM Board meeting

“Good morning, my name is Taylor Lookofsky and I would first like to thank Rosa, who is one of the many doctors in my life. Rosa presented me with this amazing opportunity to come and speak to you today about my life and the challenges living with IPEX.

  • I’d like to give you some background into my health challenges I’ve faced my entire life. Now to give some context to my years of struggle, I am 28 years old, not 10 years younger as some may have assumed.
  • My first diagnosis came at the age of 1 ½ years old -type 1 diabetes.
  • Soon after being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I had to have a feeding tube inserted in my abdomen as I was restricted from eating almost all foods due to unknown food allergies. I was not allowed to ingest ANY food until the age of 6 years old. When I was finally introduced to food, any food ingested was tasteless and felt like sandpaper on my tongue since I had to train myself to eat.
  • Around age 10, I would be faced with the beginning of a never-ending battle with my dermatitis. I remember specific details where my mother had taken me to a dermatologist to try and figure out what was happening to my skin as it was red, blotchy, oozing. I remember shivering so badly that my mom had to ask the doctor’s office to turn the air down.
  • At age 18 I had been formally diagnosed with IPEX. I lost my hair and my skin started a battle that was more intense than any previous episode. I remember taking showers and clumps of my hair would fall out, and I would cry in the shower not knowing what was going on.
  • At age 20, I would go through the most horrific episode with my skin to date. I was bed ridden, on pain meds and could not sleep. I had gone to all of my doctors trying to figure out what had triggered this event, and no doctor could figure out what was happening, leaving me extremely frustrated, depressed and drained of all energy. I went to the burn center as a last resort and was then treated like a burn patient. To care for these wounds, I would bathe, take a sponge and physically scrape these wounds to keep them infection free and as clean as possible. When I would exit the bath, I felt like a dried-up sponge and my skin was so tight that any movement would make my skin crack open and start bleeding. To add to this, I had to use medicated wraps to help with the healing process.
  • In an ongoing attempt to treat my many symptoms, I took a series of medications that came with side effects. I have had at least 15 surgeries to remove squamous cells caused by one of the medications: In 2018, my colon perforated. As a result, I now have a colostomy bag.

The IPEX symptoms have affected me not just physically, but mentally as well. I had lost all my hair and growth has been permanently stunted, and I have not reached the point in puberty as my male counterparts. I would go day by day and see all my peers and be envious that they were tall, had beards and hair, had relationships, and the confidence that I was lacking and admittedly, still lack to this day at times.

I’ve felt hopeless because there have been so few treatment options and with the treatment currently available, I have tried hundreds of medications and creams, and have had my blood drawn countless times in hopes of finding a medication that works for me, or a cure for this insufferable disease. However, nothing. As a result, I have been battling depression singe age 20. There were days that went by where I thought “I just don’t want to be here if this is what life is going to be like.” 

The funding needed for Dr. Rosa’s therapy would be life changing in the way of new treatment options and potentially lead to a cure for this horrific disease.

I am determined to see that there is so much more to life than what society is telling me. I’ve decided that I would not conform to societies rules, and instead, tell society how I am going to live my unique and authentic life with IPEX.

I appreciate your time and consideration to fund this important research.”

CIRM Board Awards $15.8 Million to Four Translational Research Projects

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment

Last week, the CIRM Board approved $32.92 million in awards directed towards four new clinical trials in vision related diseases and Parkinson’s Disease.

In addition to these awards, the Board also approved investing $15.80 million in four awards in the Translational Research program. The goal of this program is to help promising projects complete the testing needed to begin talking to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about holding a clinical trial.

Before we go into more specific details of each one of these awards, here is a table summarizing these four new projects:

ApplicationTitleInstitutionAward Amount
TRAN1 11536Ex Vivo Gene Editing of Human Hematopoietic Stem Cells for the Treatment of X-Linked Hyper IgM Syndrome  UCLA $4,896,628
TRAN1 11555BCMA/CS1 Bispecific CAR-T Cell Therapy to Prevent Antigen Escape in Multiple Myeloma  UCLA $3,176,805
TRAN1 11544 Neural Stem cell-mediated oncolytic immunotherapy for ovarian cancer  City of Hope $2,873,262
TRAN1 11611Development of a human stem cell-derived inhibitory neuron therapeutic for the treatment of chronic focal epilepsyNeurona Therapeutics$4,848,750
Dr. Caroline Kuo, UCLA

$4.89 million was awarded to Dr. Caroline Kuo at UCLA to pursue a gene therapy approach for X-Linked Hyper IgM Syndrome (X-HIM).

X-HIM is a hereditary immune disorder observed predominantly in males in which there are abnormal levels of different types of antibodies in the body.  Antibodies are also known as Immunoglobulin (Ig) and they combat infections by attaching to germs and other foreign substances, marking them for destruction.  In infants with X-HIM, there are normal or high levels of antibody IgM but low levels of antibodies IgG, IgA, and IgE.  The low level of these antibodies make it difficult to fight off infection, resulting in frequent pneumonia, sinus infections, ear infections, and parasitic infections.  Additionally, these infants have an increased risk of cancerous growths. 

The gene therapy approach Dr. Kuo is continuing to develop involves using CRISPR/Cas9 technology to modify human blood stem cells with a functional version of the gene necessary for normal levels of antibody production.  The ultimate goal would be to take a patient’s own blood stem cells, modify them with the corrected gene, and reintroduce them back into the patient.

CIRM has previously funded Dr. Kuo’s earlier work related to developing this gene therapy approach for XHIM.

Dr. Yvonne Chen, UCLA

$3.17 million was awarded to Dr. Yvonne Chen at UCLA to develop a CAR-T cell therapy for multiple myeloma (MM).

MM is a type of blood cancer that forms in the plasma cell, a type of white blood cell that is found in the bone marrow.  An estimated 32,110 people in the United States will be diagnosed with MM in 2019 alone.  Several treatment options are available to patients with MM, but there is no curative therapy.

The therapy that Dr. Chen is developing will consist of a genetically-modified version of the patient’s own T cells, which are an immune system cell that can destroy foreign or abnormal cells.  The T cells will be modified with a protein called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that will recognize BCMA and CS1, two different markers found on the surface of MM cells.  These modified T cells (CAR-T cells) are then infused into the patient, where they are expected to detect and destroy BCMA and CS1 expressing MM cells.

Dr. Chen is using CAR-T cells that can detect two different markers in a separate clinical trial that you can read about in a previous blog post.

Dr. Karen Aboody, City of Hope

$2.87 million was awarded to Dr. Karen Aboody at City of Hope to develop an immunotherapy delivered via neural stem cells (NSCs) for treatment of ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer affects approximately 22,000 women per year in the United States alone.  Most ovarian cancer patients eventually develop resistance to chemotherapy, leading to cancer progression and death, highlighting the need for treatment of recurring ovarian cancer.

The therapy that Dr. Aboody is developing will use an established line of NSCs to deliver a virus that specifically targets these tumor cells.  Once the virus has entered the tumor cell, it will continuously replicate until the cell is destroyed.  The additional copies of the virus will then go on to target neighboring tumor cells.  This process could potentially stimulate the body’s own immune response to fight off the cancer cells as well.

Dr. Cory Nicholas, Neurona Therapeutics

$4.85 million was awarded to Dr. Cory Nicholas at Neurona Therapeutics to develop a treatment for epilepsy.

Epilepsy affects more than 3 million people in the United States with about 150,000 newly diagnosed cases in the US every year. It results in persistent, difficult to manage, or uncontrollable seizures that can be disabling and significantly impair quality of life. Unfortunately, anti-epileptic drugs fail to manage the disease in a large portion of people with epilepsy. Approximately one-third of epilepsy patients are considered to be drug-resistant, meaning that they do not adequately respond to at least two anti-epileptic drugs.

The therapy that Dr. Nicholas is developing will derive interneurons from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). These newly derived interneurons would then be delivered to the brain via injection whereby the new cells are able to help regulate aberrant brain activity and potentially eliminate or significantly reduce the occurrence of seizures.

CIRM has previously funded the early stage development of this approach via a comprehensive grant and discovery grant.

Using film to break down barriers around rare disease

/ Kevin McCormack / 3 Comments

You can read about a disease or hear someone talking about it and be engaged and interested. But when you see and hear the people who have the disease talking about it and the impact it has on their lives, that’s when a profound impact occurs. When you look into their eyes and hear them describe, in their own words, how it affects them, you are moved, truly moved, in ways that are hard to describe.

That’s the goal of the Rare Disease Film Festival taking place in San Francisco Saturday November 9 and Sunday November 10. Over two days they’ll be showing 50 films on rare diseases. The film “Rare But Not Alone” highlights conditions such as Batten Disease, Sanfilippo Syndrome and Epidermolysis Bullosa. It shows how families with rare conditions can often feel isolated and alone, but through the internet they can create support groups and a community to help them cope with the pain and challenges that these conditions create.

Daniel DeFabio, the co-founder of the festival, says the idea grew out of his own experiences as a parent.

“I had run a film festival before, it was general interest short independent films. But when my son was diagnosed with Menkes Disease, I made a film about that. After exploring the best festivals and conferences to screen a rare disease film I saw an unmet need.  There was nothing out there like a film festival focused on the rare disease community.  A community of 30 million Americans seemed to deserve its own festival.”

A rare disease is one that affects fewer than 200,000 people. In the US they are also called “Orphan diseases” because drug companies were not interested in adopting them to help create cures or new treatments. At CIRM we are committed to funding research into these kinds of condition. We are not in the business of making a profit. We are here to try and save lives. Of the 60 clinical trials we now fund more than a dozen of them target rare conditions.

DeFabio says the festival is designed to be a place for people to come and share their experiences, but he also hopes it has a more practical, tangible result.

“I partnered with Bo Bigelow. His daughter has USP7. We knew we wanted more than just increased awareness. We wanted awareness that could lead to action. We structured the festival to get the right people together and talking about what they learn in the films. You know Debussy’s line on how music is what happens in the space between the notes? We felt advocacy was what happens in the space between the films. We hope after a screening people stay for a while and start conversations in our lobby. Ideally, they’ll make connection to a new researcher, or a researcher might realize a new application for work that has already been done.”

“We say of our festival you may never be more moved at the movies. And we provide the packs to tissues to our audience in case we’re right.”