All this month we are using our blog and social media to highlight a new chapter in CIRM’s life, thanks to the voters approving Proposition 14. We are looking back at what we have done since we were created in 2004, and also looking forward to the future. Today we take a deeper dive into CIRM’s Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network.  The following is written by Dr. Geoff Lomax, Senior Officer of CIRM Therapeutics and Strategic Infrastructure.

The year 2014 has been described as the regenerative medicine renaissance: the European Union approved its first stem cell-based therapy and the FDA authorized ViaCyte’s CIRM funded clinical trial for diabetes. A path forward for stem cell treatments had emerged and there was a growing pipeline of products moving towards the clinic. At the time, many in the field came to recognize the need for clinical trial sites with the expertise to manage this growing pipeline. Anticipating this demand, CIRM’s provided funding for a network of medical centers capable of supporting all aspect of regenerative medicine clinical trials. In 2015, the Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network was launched to for this purpose.

The Alpha Clinics Network is comprised of leading California medical centers with specific expertise in delivering patient-centered stem cell and gene therapy treatments. UC San Diego, City of Hope, UC Irvine and UC Los Angeles were included in the initial launch, and UC San Francisco and UC Davis entered the network in 2017. Between 2015 and 2020 these sites supported 105 regenerative medicine clinical trials. Twenty-three were CIRM-funded clinical trials and the remaining 82 were sponsored by commercial companies or the Alpha Clinic site. These trials are addressing unmet medical needs for almost every disease where regenerative medicine is showing promise including blindness, blood disorders (e.g. sickle cell disease) cancer, diabetes, HIV/AIDS, neurological diseases among others.

As of spring of 2020 the network had inked over $57 million in contracts with commercial sponsors. High demand for Alpha Clinics reflects the valuable human and technical resources they provide clinical trial sponsors. These resources include:

• Skilled patient navigators to educate patients and their families about stem cell and gene therapy treatments and assist them through the clinical trial process.
• Teams and facilities specialized in the manufacturing and/or processing of patients’ treatments. In some instances, multiple Alpha Clinic sites collaborate in manufacturing and delivery of a personalized treatment to the patient.
• Nurses and clinicians with experience with regenerative medicine and research protocols to effectively deliver treatments and subsequently monitor the patients.

The multi- site collaborations are an example of how the network operates synergistically to accelerate the development of new treatments and clinical trials. For example, the UC San Francisco Alpha Clinic is collaborating with UC Berkeley and the UC Los Angeles Alpha Clinic to develop a CIRM-funded gene therapy for sickle cell disease. Each partner brings a unique expertise to the program that aims to correct a genetic mutilation in the patients’ blood stem cells to effectively cure the disease. Most recently, City of Hope has partnered with UC Irvine and UC San Diego as part of CIRM’s COVID-19 research program to study how certain immune system antibodies might be used as a treatment for respiratory disease in infected patients. In another COVID-19 study, UC Irvine and UC Davis are working with a commercial sponsor to evaluate a treatment for infected adults.

The examples above are a small sample of the variety of collaborations CIRM funding has enabled. As the Alpha Clinics track record grown, sponsors are increasingly coming to California to enable the success of their research programs. Sponsors with trials running across the country have noted a desire to expand their number of Alpha Clinic sties because they consistently perform at the highest level.

Back in 2014, it was hard to imagine over one hundred clinical trials would be served by the CIRM network in just five years. Fortunately, CIRM was able to draw on the knowledge of its internal team, external advisors and the ICOC to anticipate this need and provide California infrastructure to rise to the occasion.