Accelerating Center

Overcoming obstacles and advancing treatments to patients

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

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UC Davis GMP Manufacturing facility: Photo courtesy UC Davis

When you are trying to do something that has never been done before, there are bound to be challenges to meet and obstacles to overcome. At the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) we are used to coming up with great ideas and hearing people ask “Well, how are you going to do that?”

Our new 5-year Strategic Plan is how. It’s the roadmap that will help guide us as we work to overcome critical bottlenecks in bringing regenerative medicine therapies to people in need.

Providing more than money

People often think of CIRM as a funding agency, providing the money needed to do research. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. With every project we fund, we also offer a lot of support. That’s particularly true at the clinical stage, where therapies are being tested in people. Projects we fund in clinical trials don’t just get money, they also have access to:

  • Alpha Stem Cells Clinic Network – This is a group of specialized medical centers that have the experience and expertise to deliver new stem cell and gene therapies.
  • The CIRM Cell and Gene Therapy Center – This helps with developing projects, overcoming manufacturing problems, and offers guidance on working with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to get permission to run clinical trials.
  • CIRM Clinical Advisory Panels (CAPs) – These are teams put together to help advise researchers on a clinical trial and to overcome problems. A crucial element of a CAP is a patient advocate who can help design a trial around the needs of the patients, to help with patient recruitment and retention.

Partnering with key stakeholders

Now, we want to build on this funding model to create new ways to support researchers in bringing their work to patients. This includes earlier engagement with regulators like the FDA to ensure that projects match their requirements. It includes meetings with insurers and other healthcare stakeholders, to make sure that if a treatment is approved, that people can get access to it and afford it.

In the past, some in the regenerative medicine field thought of the FDA as an obstacle to approval of their work. But as David Martin, a CIRM Board member and industry veteran says, the FDA is really a key ally.

“Turning a promising drug candidate into an approved therapy requires overcoming many bottlenecks… CIRM’s most effective and committed partner in accelerating this is the FDA.”

Removing barriers to manufacturing

Another key area highlighted in our Strategic Plan is overcoming manufacturing obstacles. Because these therapies are “living medicines” they are complex and costly to produce. There is often a shortage of skilled technicians to do the jobs that are needed, and the existing facilities may not be able to meet the demand for mass production once the FDA gives permission to start a clinical trial. 

To address all these issues CIRM wants to create a California Manufacturing Network that combines academic innovation and industry expertise to address critical manufacturing bottlenecks. It will also coordinate training programs to help build a diverse and expertly trained manufacturing workforce.

CIRM will work with academic institutions that already have their own manufacturing facilities (such as UC Davis) to help develop improved ways of producing therapies in sufficient quantities for research and clinical trials. The Manufacturing Network will also involve industry partners who can develop facilities capable of the large-scale production of therapies that will be needed when products are approved by the FDA for wider use.

CIRM, in collaboration with this network, will also help develop education and hands-on training programs for cell and gene therapy manufacturing at California community colleges and universities. By providing internships and certification programs we will help create a talented, diverse workforce that is equipped to meet the growing demands of the industry.

You can read more about these goals in our 2022-27 Strategic Plan.

Hitting our goals: Making good progress

/ Kevin McCormack / 4 Comments

Way, way back in 2015 – seems like a lifetime ago doesn’t it – the team at CIRM sat down and planned out our Big 6 goals for the next five years. The end result was a Strategic Plan that was bold, ambitious and set us on course to do great things or kill ourselves trying. Well, looking back we can take some pride in saying we did a really fine job, hitting almost every goal and exceeding them in some cases. So, as we plan our next five-year Strategic Plan we thought it worthwhile to look back at where we started and what we achieved. Goal #5 was Advance.

A dictionary definition of progression is “The act of moving forward or proceeding in a course.” That’s precisely what we set out to do when we set one of the goals in our 2015 Strategic Plan. We wanted to do all that we could to make sure the work we were funding could advance to the next stage. The goal we set was:

Advance: Increase projects advancing to the next stage of development by 50%.

The first question we faced was what did we mean by progression and how were we going to measure it? The answer basically boiled down to this: when a CIRM award completes one stage of research and gets CIRM funding to move on to the next stage or to develop a second generation of the same device or therapy.

In the pre-2016 days we’d had some success, on average getting around nine progression events every year. But if we were going to increase that by 50 percent we knew we had to step up our game and offer some incentives so that the team behind a successful project had a reason, other than just scientific curiosity, to try and move their research to the next level.

So, we created a series of linkages between the different stages of research, so the product of each successful investment was the prerequisite for the next stage of development for the research or technology.

We changed the way we funded projects, going from offering awards on an irregular basis to having them happen according to a pre-defined schedule with each program type offered multiple times a year. This meant potential applicants knew when the next opportunity to apply would come, enabling them to prepare and file at the time that was best for them and not just because we said so. We also timed these schedules so that programs could progress from one stage to the next without interruption.

But that’s not all. We recognized that some people may be great scientists at one level but didn’t have the experience or expertise to carry their project forward. So, we created both an Accelerating Center and Translating Center to help them do that. The Translating Center helped projects do the work necessary to get ready to apply to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for permission to start a clinical trial. The Accelerating Center helped the team prepare that application for the trial and then plan how that trial would be carried out.

Creating these two centers had an additional benefit; it meant the work that did progress did so faster and was of a higher quality than it might otherwise have been.

Putting all those new building blocks in place meant a lot of work for the CIRM team, on top of their normal duties. But, as always, the team rose to the challenge. By the end of December 2020, a total of 74 projects had advanced or progressed to the next level, an increase of 100 percent on our pre-2016 days.

When we were laying out the goals we said that “The full implementation of these programs will create the chassis of a machine that provides a continuous, predictable, and timely pathway for the discovery and development of promising stem cell treatments.” Thanks to the voter approved Proposition 14 we now have the fund to help those treatments realize that promise.

Hitting our Goals: Playing Matchmaker

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Way, way back in 2015 – seems like a lifetime ago doesn’t it – the team at CIRM sat down and planned out our Big 6 goals for the next five years. The end result was a Strategic Plan that was bold, ambitious and set us on course to do great things or kill ourselves trying. Well, looking back we can take some pride in saying we did a really fine job, hitting almost every goal and exceeding them in some cases. So, as we plan our next five-year Strategic Plan we thought it worthwhile to look back at where we started and what we achieved. Goal #3 was Partner.

In the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” two of the daughters sing about their hopes of finding a husband, through the services of a matchmaker:

Matchmaker, Matchmaker,
Make me a match,
Find me a find,
Catch me a catch

While CIRM isn’t in the business of finding husbands for young ladies, we have set up ourselves as matchmakers of a very different kind. Over the course of the last five years or more we have actively tried to find deep pocketed partners for some of the researchers we are funding. You could say we are changing the last line in that verse to “Catch me some cash.” And we do.

Our goal is to help these researchers have access to the kind of money they’re going to need to move their work into clinical trials and through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process, so they are available to people who need them. To do that we created what we call our Industry Alliance Program (IAP).

The goal of the IAP is simple, to be proactive in creating partnerships between industry and our grantees, helping develop direct opportunities for industry to partner with CIRM in accelerating the most promising stem cell, gene and regenerative medicine therapy programs to commercialization.

It takes a lot of money to move a promising idea out of the lab and into the arms, or other body parts, of patients; one recent estimate put that at around $1 billion. CIRM can help with providing the funding to get projects off the ground and into clinical trials, but as you get to larger clinical trials it gets a lot more expensive. The IAP brings in well-heeled investors to help cover those expense.

Back in 2015, when we were developing our Strategic Plan, we made these partnerships one of our Big 6 goals. And, as with everything we did in that plan, we set an ambitious target of “partnering 50% of unpartnered clinical projects with commercial partners.”

So, how did we go about trying to reach that goal? Our Business Development Team (Drs Shyam Patel and Sohel Talib) worked with large companies to help identify their strategic focus and then provided them with non-confidential information about projects we fund that might interest them. If they saw something they felt had promise we introduced them to the researchers behind that project. In essence, we played matchmaker.

But it wasn’t just about making introductions. We stayed involved as the two groups got to know each other, offering both scientific and legal advice, to help them overcome any reservations or obstacles they might encounter.

So how did we do? Pretty good I would have to say. By the end of 2020 we had partnered 63% of unpartnered clinical projects, 72 events altogether, generating almost $13 billion in additional investments in these projects. That money can help move these projects through the approvals process and ultimately, we hope, into the clinic.

But we’re not done. Not by a long shot. Now that we have achieved that goal we have our eyes set on even bigger things. We are now working on creating a new Strategic Plan that is considering bringing industry in to partner with projects at earlier stages or creating public-private partnerships to ensure there is enough manufacturing capacity for all the new therapies in the pipeline.

We have a lot of work to do. But thanks to the passage of Proposition 14 we now have the time and money we need to do that work. We’ve got a lot more matchmaking to do.

Turning the corner with the FDA and NIH; CIRM creates new collaborations to advance stem cell research

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

FDAThis blog is part of the Month of CIRM series on the Stem Cellar

A lot can change in a couple of years. Just take our relationship with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

When we were putting together our Strategic Plan in 2015 we did a survey of key players and stakeholders at CIRM – Board members, researchers, patient advocates etc. – and a whopping 70 percent of them listed the FDA as the biggest impediment for the development of stem cell treatments.

As one stakeholder told us at the time:

“Is perfect becoming the enemy of better? One recent treatment touted by the FDA as a regulatory success had such a high clinical development hurdle placed on it that by the time it was finally approved the standard of care had evolved. When it was finally approved, five years later, its market potential had significantly eroded and the product failed commercially.”

Changing the conversation

To overcome these hurdles we set a goal of changing the regulatory landscape, finding a way to make the system faster and more efficient, but without reducing the emphasis on the safety of patients. One of the ways we did this was by launching our “Stem Cell Champions” campaign to engage patients, patient advocates, the public and everyone else who supports stem cell research to press for change at the FDA. We also worked with other organizations to help get the 21st Century Cures Act passed.

21 century cures

Today the regulatory landscape looks quite different than it did just a few years ago. Thanks to the 21st Century Cures Act the FDA has created expedited pathways for stem cell therapies that show promise. One of those is called the Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation, which gives projects that show they are both safe and effective in early-stage clinical trials the possibility of an accelerated review by the FDA. Of the first projects given RMAT designation, three were CIRM-funded projects (Humacyte, jCyte and Asterias)

Partnering with the NIH

Our work has also paved the way for a closer relationship with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is looking at CIRM as a model for advancing the field of regenerative medicine.

In recent years we have created a number of innovations including introducing CIRM 2.0, which dramatically improved our ability to fund the most promising research, making it faster, easier and more predictable for researchers to apply. We also created the Stem Cell Center  to make it easier to move the most promising research out of the lab and into clinical trials, and to give researchers the support they need to help make those trials successful. To address the need for high-quality stem cell clinical trials we created the CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network. This is a network of leading medical centers around the state that specialize in delivering stem cell therapies, sharing best practices and creating new ways of making it as easy as possible for patients to get the care they need.

The NIH looked at these innovations and liked them. So much so they invited CIRM to come to Washington DC and talk about them. It was a great opportunity so, of course, we said yes. We expected them to carve out a few hours for us to chat. Instead they blocked out a day and a half and brought in the heads of their different divisions to hear what we had to say.

A model for the future

We hope the meeting is, to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart at the end of Casablanca, “the start of a beautiful friendship.” We are already seeing signs that it’s not just a passing whim. In July the NIH held a workshop that focused on what will it take to make genome editing technologies, like CRISPR, a clinical reality. Francis Collins, NIH Director, invited CIRM to be part of the workshop that included thought leaders from academia, industry and patients advocates. The workshop ended with a recommendation that the NIH should consider building a center of excellence in gene editing and transplantation, based on the CIRM model (my emphasis).  This would bring together a multidisciplinary disease team including, process development, cGMP manufacturing, regulatory and clinical development for Investigational New Drug (IND) filing and conducting clinical trials, all under one roof.

dr_collins

Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the NIH

In preparation, the NIH visited the CIRM-funded Stem Cell Center at the City of Hope to explore ways to develop this collaboration. And the NIH has already begun implementing these suggestions starting with a treatment targeting sickle cell disease.

There are no guarantees in science. But we know that if you spend all your time banging your head against a door all you get is a headache. Today it feels like the FDA has opened the door and that, together with the NIH, they are more open to collaborating with organizations like CIRM. We have removed the headache, and created the possibility that by working together we truly can accelerate stem cell research and deliver the therapies that so many patients desperately need.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Streamlining Stem Cell Therapy Development for Impatient Patients

/ Todd Dubnicoff / 2 Comments

During this third week of the Month of CIRM, we are focusing on CIRM’s Infrastructure programs which are all focused on helping to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.

Time is money. It’s a cliché but still very true, especially in running a business. The longer it takes to get things done, the more costs you’ll most likely face. But in the business of developing new medical therapies, time is also people’s lives.

Currently, it takes about eight years to move a promising stem cell treatment from the lab into clinical trials. For patients with fatal, incurable diseases, that is eight years too long. And even when promising therapies reach clinical trials, only about 1 out of 10 get approved, according to a comprehensive 2014 study in Nature Biotechnology. These sobering stats slow the process of getting treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.

While a lack of therapy effectiveness or safety play into the low success rate, other factors can have a significant impact on the delay or suspension of a trial. An article, “Why Do Clinical Trials Fail?” in Clinical Trials Arena from a couple years back outlined a few. Here’s a snippet from that article:

  • “Poor study design: Selecting the wrong patients, the wrong dosing and the wrong endpoint, as well as bad data and bad site management cause severe problems.”
  • “Complex protocol: Simple is better. A complex protocol, which refers to trying to answer too many questions in one single trial, can produce faulty data and contradictory results.”
  • “Poor management: A project manager who does not have enough experience in costing and conducting clinical trials will lead to weak planning, with no clear and real timelines, and to ultimate failure.”

CIRM recognized that these clinical trial planning and execution setbacks can stem from the fact that, although lab researchers are experts at transforming an idea into a candidate therapy, they may not be masters in navigating the complex regulatory requirements of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Many simply don’t have the experience to get those therapies off the ground by themselves.

Lab researchers are experts at transforming an idea into a candidate therapy but most are inexperienced at navigating the complex regulatory requirements of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

So, to help make this piece of the therapy development process more efficient and faster, the CIRM governing Board last year approved the launch of the Translating Center and Accelerating Center: two novel infrastructure programs which CIRM grantees can tap into as they carry their promising candidate therapies from lab experiments in cells to preclinical studies in animals to clinical trials in people. Both centers were awarded to QuintilesIMS which collectively dubbed them The Stem Cell Center.

The Stem Cell Center acts as a one-stop-shop, stem cell therapy development support system for current and prospective CIRM grantees, giving them advanced priority for QuintilesIMS services. So how does it work? When a scientist’s initial idea for a cell therapy gains traction and, through a lot of effort in the lab, matures into a bona fide therapy candidate to treat a particular disease, the next big step is to prepare the therapy for testing in people. But that’s easier said than done. To ensure safety, the Food and Drug Administration requires a rigorous set of tests and documentation that make up an Investigational New Drug (IND) application, which must be submitted before any testing in people take can place in the U.S.

That’s where the Translation Center comes into the picture. It carries out the necessary research activities to show, as much as is possible in animals, that the therapy is safe. The Translating Center also helps at this stage with manufacturing the cell therapy product so that it’s of a consistent quality for both the preclinical and future clinical trial studies. If all goes as planned, the grantee will have the necessary pieces to file an IND. At this stage, the Translating Center coordinates with the Accelerating Center which focuses on supporting the many facets of a clinical study including the IND filing, clinical trial design, monitoring of patient safety, and project management.

Because the work of Translating and Accelerating Centers is focused on these regulatory activities day in and day out, they have the know-how to pave a clearer path, with fewer pitfalls, for the grantee to navigate the complex maze we call cell therapy development. It’s not just helpful for the researchers seeking approval from the FDA, but it helps the FDA too. Because cell therapies are still so new, creating a standardized, uniform approach to stem cell-based clinical trial projects will help the FDA streamline their evaluation of the projects.

Ultimately, and most importantly, all of those gears running smoothly in sync will help leave a lasting legacy for California and the world: an acceleration in the development of stem cell treatment for patients with unmet medical needs.

Building California’s stem cell research community, from the ground up

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

For week three of the Month of CIRM, our topic is infrastructure. What is infrastructure? Read on for a big picture overview and then we’ll fill in the details over the course of the week.

When CIRM was created in 2001, our goal was to grow the stem cell research field in California. But to do that, we first had to build some actual buildings. Since then, our infrastructure programs have taken on many different forms, but all have been focused on a single mission – helping accelerate stem cell research to patients with unmet medical needs.
CIRM_Infrastucture-program-iconScreen Shot 2017-10-16 at 10.58.38 AM

In the early 2000’s, stem cell scientists faced a quandary. President George W. Bush had placed limits on how federal funds could be used for embryonic stem cell research. His policy allowed funding of research involving some existing embryonic stem cell lines, but banned research that developed or conducted research on new stem lines.

Many researchers felt the existing lines were not the best quality and could only use them in a limited capacity. But because they were dependent on the government to fund their work, had no alternative but to comply. Scientists who chose to use non-approved lines were unable to use their federally funded labs for stem cell work.

The creation of CIRM changed that. In 2008, CIRM launched its Major Facilities Grant Program. The program had two major goals:

1) To accommodate the growing numbers of stem cell researchers coming in California as a result of CIRM’s grants and funding.

2) To provide new research space that didn’t have to comply with the federal restrictions on stem cell research.

Over the next few years, the program invested $271million to help build 12 new research facilities around California from Sacramento to San Diego. The institutions used CIRM’s funding to leverage and attract an additional $543 million in funds from private donors and institutions to construct and furnish the buildings.

These world-class laboratories gave scientists the research space they needed to work with any kind of stem cell they wanted and develop new potential therapies. It also enabled the institutions to bring together under one roof, all the stem cell researchers, who previously had been scattered across each campus.

One other important benefit was the work these buildings provided for thousands of construction workers at a time of record unemployment in the industry. Here’s a video about the 12 facilities we helped build:

But building physical facilities was just our first foray into developing infrastructure. We were far from finished.

In the early days of stem cell research, many scientists used cells from different sources, created using different methods. This meant it was often hard to compare results from one study to another. So, in 2013 CIRM created an iPSC Repository, a kind of high tech stem cell bank. The repository collected tissue samples from people who have different diseases, turned those samples into high quality stem cell lines – the kind known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) – and then made those samples available to researchers around the world. This not only gave researchers a powerful resource to use in developing a deeper understanding of different diseases, but because the scientists were all using the same cell lines that meant their findings could be compared to each other.

That same year we also launched a plan to create a new, statewide network of clinics that specialize in using stem cells to treat patients. The goal of the Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network is to support and accelerate clinical trials for programs funded by the agency, academic researchers or industry. We felt that because stem cell therapies are a completely new way of treating diseases and disorders, we needed a completely new way of delivering treatments in a safe and effective manner.

The network began with three clinics – UC San Diego, UCLA/UC Irvine, and City of Hope – but at our last Board meeting was expanded to five with the addition of UC Davis and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. This network will help the clinics streamline challenging processes such as enrolling patients, managing regulatory procedures and sharing data and will speed the testing and distribution of experimental stem cell therapies. We will be posting a more detailed blog about how our Alpha Clinics are pushing innovative stem cell treatments tomorrow.

As the field advanced we knew that we had to find a new way to help researchers move their research out of the lab and into clinical trials where they could be tested in people. Many researchers were really good at the science, but had little experience in navigating the complex procedures needed to get the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to test their work in a clinical trial.

So, our Agency created the Translating (TC) and Accelerating Centers (AC). The idea was that the TC would help researchers do all the preclinical testing necessary to apply for permission from the FDA to start a clinical trial. Then the AC would help the researchers set up the trial and actually run it.

In the end, one company, Quintiles IMS, won both awards so we combined the two entities into one, The Stem Cell Center, a kind of one-stop-shopping home to help researchers move the most promising treatments into people.

That’s not the whole story of course – I didn’t even mention the Genomics Initiative – but it’s hard to cram 13 years of history into a short blog. And we’re not done yet. We are always looking for new ways to improve what we do and how we do it. We are a work in progress, and we are determined to make as much progress as possible in the years to come.

CIRM Alpha Clinics Network charts a new course for delivering stem cell treatments

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Sometimes it feels like finding a cure is the easy part; getting it past all the hurdles it must overcome to be able to reach patients is just as big a challenge. Fortunately, a lot of rather brilliant minds are hard at work to find the most effective ways of doing just that.

Last week, at the grandly titled Second Annual Symposium of the CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network, some of those minds gathered to talk about the issues around bringing stem cell therapies to the people who need them, the patients.

The goal of the Alpha Clinics Network is to accelerate the development and delivery of stem cell treatments to patients. In doing that one of the big issues that has to be addressed is cost; how much do you charge for a treatment that can change someone’s life, even save their life? For example, medications that can cure Hepatitis C cost more than $80,000. So how much would a treatment cost that can cure a disease like Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)? CIRM-funded researchers have come up with a cure for SCID, but this is a rare disease that affects between 40 – 100 newborns every year, so the huge cost of developing this would fall on a small number of patients.

The same approach that is curing SCID could also lead to a cure for sickle cell disease, something that affects around 100,000 people in the US, most of them African Americans. Because we are adding more people to the pool that can be treated by a therapy does that mean the cost of the treatment should go down, or will it stay the same to increase profits?

Jennifer Malin, United Healthcare

Jennifer Malin from United Healthcare did a terrific job of walking us through the questions that have to be answered when trying to decide how much to charge for a drug. She also explored the thorny issue of who should pay; patients, insurance companies, the state? As she pointed out, it’s no use having a cure if it’s priced so high that no one can afford it.

Joseph Alvarnas, the Director of Value-based Analytics at City of Hope – where the conference was held – said that in every decision we make about stem cell therapies we “must be mindful of economic reality and inequality” to ensure that these treatments are available to all, and not just the rich.

“Remember, the decisions we make now will influence not just the lives of those with us today but also the lives of all those to come.”

Of course long before you even have to face the question of who will pay for it, you must have a treatment to pay for. Getting a therapy through the regulatory process is challenging at the best of times. Add to that the fact that many researchers have little experience navigating those tricky waters and you can understand why it takes more than eight years on average for a cell therapy to go from a good idea to a clinical trial (in contrast it takes just 3.2 years for a more traditional medication to get into a clinical trial).

Sunil Kadim, QuintilesIMS

Sunil Kadam from QuintilesIMS talked about the skills and expertise needed to navigate the regulatory pathway. QuintilesIMS partners with CIRM to run the Stem Cell Center, which helps researchers apply for and then run a clinical trial, providing the guidance that is essential to keeping even the most promising research on track.

But, as always, at the heart of every conference, are the patients and patient advocates. They provided the inspiration and a powerful reminder of why we all do what we do; to help find treatments and cures for patients in need.

The Alpha Clinic Network is only a few years old but is already running 35 different clinical trials involving hundreds of patients. The goal of the conference was to discuss lessons learned and share best practices so that number of trials and patients can continue to increase.

The CIRM Board is also doing its part to pick up the pace, approving funding for up to two more Alpha Clinic sites.  The deadline to apply to be one of our new Alpha Clinics sites is May 15th, and you can learn more about how to apply on our funding page.

Since joining CIRM I have been to many conferences but this was, in my opinion, the best one I have ever intended. It brought together people from every part of the field to give the most complete vision for where we are, and where we are headed. The talks were engaging, and inspiring.

Kristin Macdonald was left legally blind by retinitis pigmentosa, a rare vision-destroying disease. A few years ago she became the first person to be treated with a CIRM-funded therapy aimed to restoring some vision. She says it is helping, that for years she lived in a world of darkness and, while she still can’t see clearly, now she can see light. She says coming out of the darkness and into the light has changed her world.

Kristin Macdonald

In the years to come the Alpha Clinics Network hopes to be able to do the same, and much more, for many more people in need.

To read more about the Alpha Clinics Meeting, check out our Twitter Moments.

License to heal: UC Davis deal looks to advance stem cell treatment for bone loss and arthritis

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Nancy Lane

Wei Yao and Nancy Lane of UC Davis: Photo courtesy UC Davis

There are many challenges in taking even the most promising stem cell treatment and turning it into a commercial product approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of the biggest is expertise. The scientists who develop the therapy may be brilliant in the lab but have little experience or expertise in successfully getting their work through a clinical trial and ultimately to market.

That’s why a team at U.C. Davis has just signed a deal with a startup company to help them move a promising stem cell treatment for arthritis, osteoporosis and fractures out of the lab and into people.

The licensing agreement combines the business acumen of Regenerative Arthritis and Bone Medicine (RABOME) with the scientific chops of the UC Davis team, led by Nancy Lane and Wei Yao.

They plan to test a hybrid molecule called RAB-001 which has shown promise in helping direct mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) – these are cells typically found in the bone marrow and fat tissue – to help stimulate bone growth and increase existing bone mass and strength. This can help heal people suffering from conditions like osteoporosis or hard to heal fractures. RAB-001 has also shown promise in reducing inflammation and so could prove helpful in treating people with inflammatory arthritis.

Overcoming problems

In a news article on the UC Davis website, Wei Yao, said RAB-001 seems to solve a problem that has long puzzled researchers:

“There are many stem cells, even in elderly people, but they do not readily migrate to bone.  Finding a molecule that attaches to stem cells and guides them to the targets we need provides a real breakthrough.”

The UC Davis team already has approval to begin a Phase 1 clinical trial to test this approach on people with osteonecrosis, a disease caused by reduced blood flow to bones. CIRM is funding this work.

The RABOME team also hopes to test RAB-001 in clinical trials for healing broken bones, osteoporosis and inflammatory arthritis.

CIRM solution

To help other researchers overcome these same regulatory hurdles in developing stem cell therapies CIRM created the Stem Cell Center with QuintilesIMS, a leading integrated information and technology-enabled healthcare service provider that has deep experience and therapeutic expertise. The Stem Cell Center will help researchers overcome the challenges of manufacturing and testing treatments to meet FDA standards, and then running a clinical trial to test that therapy in people.

With an eye toward 2020, CIRM looks at clinical milestones achieved in 2016

/ Karen Ring / 5 Comments

strategy-wideOne year ago, CIRM announced its strategic plan for the next five years. It’s a bold vision to maximize our impact in stem cell research by accelerating stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.

Our strategic plan, which can be found on our website, details how CIRM will invest in five main program areas including infrastructure, education, discovery, translation and clinical research. While CIRM has invested in these areas in the past, we are doing so now with a renewed focus to make sure our efforts have a lasting impact in California and more importantly for patients.

Now that a year has passed, it’s time to review our progress and look ahead to the next four years.

Our Progress

2016 was a very productive year. On the infrastructure side, CIRM successfully launched the Translating and Accelerating Centers, awarding both grants to QuintilesIMS. The Translating Center supports preclinical research that’s ready to advance to clinical trials but still needs approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Accelerating Center picks up where the Translating Center leaves off and offers support and management services for clinical trial projects to ensure that they succeed. Collectively called The Stem Cell Center, the goal of this new infrastructure is to increase efficiency and shorten the time it takes to get human stem cell trials up and running.

On the research side in 2016, CIRM funded over 70 promising stem cell projects ranging from education to discovery, translational and clinical projects. While of these areas are important to invest in, CIRM has shifted its focus to funding clinical trials in hopes that one or more of these trials will develop into an approved therapy for patients. So far, we’ve funded 25 trials, 22 of which are currently active since CIRM was established.

In our strategic plan, we gave ourselves the aggressive goal of funding 50 new clinical trials by 2020, which equates to 10 new trials per year. So far in 2016, we’ve funded eight clinical trials and tomorrow at our December ICOC meeting, our Governing Board will determine whether we meet our yearly clinical milestone of 10 trials by considering two more for funding.

The first trial is testing a stem cell treatment that could improve the outcome of kidney transplants. For normal kidney transplants, the recipient is required to take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent their body from rejecting the donated organ. This clinical trial aims to bypass the need for these drugs, which carry an increased risk of cancer, infection and heart disease, by injecting blood stem cells and other immune cells from the kidney donor into the patient receiving the kidney. You can read more about this proposed trial here.

The second clinical trial is a stem cell derived therapy to improve vision in patients with a degenerative eye disease called retinitis pigmentosa. This disease destroys the light sensing cells at the back of the eye and has no cure. The trial hopes that by transplanting stem cell derived retinal progenitor cells into the back of the eye, these injected cells will secrete factors that will keep the cells in the eye healthy and possibly improve a patient’s vision. You can read more about this proposed trial here.

Our Future

No matter the outcome at tomorrow’s Board meeting, I think our agency should be proud of its accomplishments since launching our strategic plan. The eight clinical trials we’ve funded this year are testing stem cell therapies for diseases including muscular dystrophy, kidney disease, primary immune diseases, and multiple types of cancer and blood disorders.

At this pace, it seems likely that we will achieve many of the goals in our strategic plan including our big goal of 50 new clinical trials. But pride and a sense of accomplishment are not what CIRM is ultimately striving for. Our mission and the reason why we exist are to help people and improve their lives. I’ll leave you with a quote from our President and CEO Randy Mills:

CIRM CEO and President, Randy Mills.

Randy Mills

“In everything we do there is a real sense of urgency, because lives are at stake. Our Board’s support for these programs highlights how every member of the CIRM team shares that commitment to moving the most promising research out of the lab and into patients as quickly as we can.”

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Creating a “Pitching Machine” to speed up our delivery of stem cell treatments to patients

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

hitting-machine

When baseball players are trying to improve their hitting they’ll use a pitching machine to help them fine tune their stroke. Having a device that delivers a ball at a consistent speed can help a batter be more consistent and effective in their swing, and hopefully get more hits.

That’s what we are hoping our new Translating and Accelerating Centers will do. We call these our “Pitching Machine”, because we hope they’ll help researchers be better prepared when they apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval to start a clinical trial, and be more efficient and effective in the way they set up and run that clinical trial once they get approval.

The CIRM Board approved the Accelerating Center earlier this summer. The $15 million award went to QuintilesIMS, a leading integrated information and technology-enabled healthcare service provider.

The Accelerating Center will provide key core services for researchers who have been given approval to run a clinical trial, including:

  • Regulatory support and management services
  • Clinical trial operations and management services
  • Data management, biostatistical and analytical services

The reason why these kinds of service are needed is simple, as Randy Mills, our President and CEO explained at the time:

“Many scientists are brilliant researchers but have little experience or expertise in navigating the regulatory process; this Accelerating Center means they don’t have to develop those skills; we provide them for them.”

The Translating Center is the second part of the “Pitching Machine”. That is due to go to our Board for a vote tomorrow. This is an innovative new center that will support the stem cell research, manufacturing, preclinical safety testing, and other activities needed to successfully apply to the FDA for approval to start a clinical trial.

The Translating Center will:

  • Provide consultation and guidance to researchers about the translational process for their stem cell product.
  • Initiate, plan, track, and coordinate activities necessary for preclinical Investigational New Drug (IND)-enabling development projects.
  • Conduct preclinical research activities, including pivotal pharmacology and toxicology studies.
  • Manufacture stem cell and gene modified stem cell products under the highest quality standards for use in preclinical and clinical studies.

The two centers will work together, helping researchers create a comprehensive development plan for every aspect of their project.

For the researchers this is important in giving them the support they need. For the FDA it could also be useful in ensuring that the applications they get from CIRM-funded projects are consistent, high quality and meet all their requirements.

We want to do everything we can to ensure that when a CIRM-funded therapy is ready to start a clinical trial that its application is more likely to be a hit with the FDA, and not to strike out.

Just as batting practice is crucial to improving performance in baseball, we are hoping our “Pitching Machine” will raise our game to the next level, and enable us to deliver some game-changing treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.