C. Randal Mills

Hitting our Goals: Accelerating to the finish line

/ 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 #6 was Accelerate.

Ever wonder how long it takes for a drug or therapy to go from basic research to approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)? Around 12 years on average is the answer. That’s a long time. And it can take even longer for stem cell therapies to go that same distance.

There are a lot of reasons why it takes so long (safety being a hugely important element) but when we were sitting down in 2015 to put together our Strategic Plan we wanted to find a way to speed up that process, to go faster, without in any way reducing the focus on safety.

So, we set a goal of reducing the time it takes from identifying a stem cell therapy candidate to getting an Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the FDA, which means it can be tested in a clinical trial. At the time it was taking us around eight years, so we decided to go big and try to reduce that time in half, to four years.

Then the question was how were we going to do that? Well, before we set the goal we did a tour of the major biomedical research institutions in California – you know, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) UC San Francisco, Stanford etc. – and asked the researchers what would help them most. Almost without exception said “a clearing house”, a way to pair early stage investigators with later stage partners who possess the appropriate expertise and interest to advance the project to the next stage of development, e.g., helping a successful basic science investigator find a qualified partner for the project’s translational research phase.

So we set out to do that. But we didn’t stop there. We also created what we called Clinical Advisory Panels or CAPs. These consisted of a CIRM Science Officer with expertise on a particular area of research, an expert on the kind of research being done, and a Patient Representative. The idea was that CAPs would help guide and advise the research team, helping them overcome specific obstacles and get ready for a clinical trial. The Patient Representative could help the researchers understand what the needs of the patient community was, so that a trial could take those into account and be more likely to succeed. For us it wasn’t enough just to fund promising research, we were determined to do all we could to support the team behind the project to advance their work.

How did we do. Pretty good I would have to say. For our Translational stage projects, the average amount of time it took for them to move to the CLIN1 stage, the last stage before a clinical trial, was 4.18 years. For our CLIN1 programs, 73 percent of those achieved their IND within 2 years, meaning they were then ready to actually start an FDA-sanctioned clinical trial.

Of course moving fast doesn’t guarantee that the therapy will ultimately prove effective. But for an agency whose mission is “to accelerate stem cell therapies to patients with unmet medical needs”, going slow is not an option.

Hitting our Goals: Let’s start at the beginning shall we

/ 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 Discover.

When journalists write about science a lot of the attention is often focused on clinical trials. It’s not too surprising, that’s the stage where you see if treatments really work in people and not just in the lab. But long before you get to the clinical trial stage there’s a huge amount of work that has to be done. The starting point for that work is in the Discovery stage, if it works there it moves to the Translational stage, and only after that, assuming it’s still looking promising, does it start thinking about moving into the clinic.

The Discovery, or basic, stage of research is where ideas are tested to see if they have any promise and have the potential to lead to the development of a therapy or device that could ultimately help patients. In many ways the goal of Discovery research is to gain a better understanding of how, in our case, stem cells work, and how to harness that power to treat particular diseases or disorders.

Without a rigorous Discovery research program you can’t begin to create a pipeline of promising projects that you can advance towards patients. And of course having a strong Discovery program is not much use if you don’t have somewhere for those projects to advance to, namely Translational and ultimately clinical.

So, when we were laying out our Strategic Plan goals back in 2015 we wanted to create a pipeline for all three programs, moving the most promising ones forward. So we set an ambitious goal.

Introduce 50 new therapeutic or device candidates into development.

Now this doesn’t mean just fund 50 projects hoping to develop a new therapy or device. A lot of studies that are funded, particularly at the earliest stages, have a good idea that just doesn’t pan out. In fact one quite common definition of early research – in this case from Translational Medicine Communications – is “the earliest stage of research, conducted for the advancement of knowledge, often without any concern for its practical applications.

That’s not what we wanted. We aren’t in this to do research just for its own sake. We fund research because we want it to lead somewhere, we want it to have a practical application. We want to fund projects that actually ended up with something much more promising, a candidate that might actually work and was ready to move into the next level of research to test it further.

And we almost, almost made it to the 50-candidate goal. We got to 46 and almost certainly would have made it to 50 if we hadn’t run out of money. Even so, that’s pretty impressive. There are now 46 projects ready to move on, or are already moving on, to the next level of research.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that these will ultimately end up as an FDA-approved therapy or device. But if you don’t set goals, you’ll never score. And now, thanks to the passage of Proposition 14, we have a chance to support those projects as they move forward.

Hitting our Goals: Scoring a half century

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 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 #2 was Expand.

Scientist preparing a sample vial for automated analysis in the lab.

When CIRM first started there was an internal report that said if we managed to help get one project into a clinical trial before we ran out of money we would be doing well. At the time that seemed quite reasonable. The field was still very much in its infancy and most of the projects we were funding, particularly in the early days, were Discovery or basic research projects.

But as the field advanced we got a little bolder. By 2010 we were funding not just our first clinical trial, but the first clinical trial in the world using embryonic stem cells. This was the Geron trial targeting spinal cord injury. Sadly the excitement didn’t last very long. After treating just five patients Geron pulled the plug on the trial, deciding that targeting cancer was a better bet.

Happily, Geron returned all the money we had loaned them, plus interest, so we were able to use that to fund more research. Soon enough we had a number of other promising candidates heading towards a meeting with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to try and get permission to start a clinical trial.

By 2014, ten years after we began, we actually had ten projects either running or getting ready to start a clinical trial. We thought that was really good. But at CIRM, really good is never good enough.

For our Strategic Plan in 2015 we decided to shoot for the moon and aim to get another 50 clinical trials over the next five years. At the time it seemed, to be honest, a bit bonkers. How on earth were we going to do that. But then our Therapeutics team went a hunting!

In the past we had the luxury of mostly just waiting for people with promising projects to approach us for funding. With an ambitious goal of getting 50 more clinical trials, we couldn’t afford to wait. The Therapeutics team scouted around for promising projects, inside and outside California, inside and outside the US, and pitched them on the benefits of applying for funding. Slowly the numbers started to rise.

By the end of 2016 we had 12 new trials. In 2017 we were really cruising along, adding 16 more trials. 2018 there was another 14 and that was also the year we passed the 50 clinical trials total since CIRM was created. We celebrated at a Board meeting with a balloon and a cake (we’re a state agency, our budget doesn’t extend to confetti). Initially the inscription on the cake read ‘Congratulations: 50 Clinical Trails’. Happily, we were able to fix it before anyone noticed. But even with the spelling error, it would still have tasted just fine.

Patient advocate Rich Lajara with the Big Balloon celebration for funding 50 clinical trials

By the time we got to mid-2020 we were stuck on 47 and with time, and money, running out it looked like we might miss the goal. But then our team put in one last effort and with weeks to spare we funded four more clinical trials for a total of 51 (68 since we started in 2004).

So, the moral is dream big but work hard. Now let’s see what we can dream up for our next Strategic Plan.

Hitting our goals: regulatory reform

/ 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. We are going to start with Regulatory Reform.

The political landscape in 2015 was dramatically different than it is today. Compared to more conventional drugs and therapies stem cells were considered a new, and very different, approach to treating diseases and disorders. At the time the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was taking a very cautious approach to approving any stem cell therapies for a clinical trial.

A survey of CIRM stakeholders found that 70% said the FDA was “the biggest impediment for the development of stem cell treatments.” One therapy, touted by the FDA as a success story, had such a high clinical development hurdle placed on it that by the time it was finally approved, five years later, its market potential had significantly eroded and the product failed commercially. As one stakeholder said: “Is perfect becoming the enemy of better?”

So, we set ourselves a goal of establishing a new regulatory paradigm, working with Congress, academia, industry, and patients, to bring about real change at the FDA and to find ways to win faster approval for promising stem cell therapies, without in any way endangering patients.

It seemed rather ambitious at the time, but achieving that goal happened much faster than any of us anticipated. With a sustained campaign by CIRM and other industry leaders, working with the patient advocacy groups, the FDA, Congress, and President Obama, the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law on December 13, 2016.

President Obama signs the 21st Century Cures Act.
Photo courtesy of NBC News

The law did something quite radical; it made the perspectives of patients an integral part of the FDA’s decision-making and approval process in the development of drugs, biological products and devices. And it sped up the review process by:

In a way the FDA took its foot off the brake but didn’t hit the accelerator, so the process moved faster, but in a safe, manageable way.

Fast forward to today and eight projects that CIRM funds have been granted RMAT designation. We have become allies with the FDA in helping advance the field. We have created a unique partnership with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to support the Cure Sickle Cell initiative and accelerate the development of cell and gene therapies for sickle cell disease.

The landscape has changed since we set a goal of regulatory reform. We still have work to do. But now we are all working together to achieve the change we all believe is both needed and possible.

Stories that caught our eye: How dying cells could help save lives; could modified blood stem cells reverse diabetes?; and FDA has good news for patients, bad news for rogue clinics

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Gunsmoke

Growing up I loved watching old cowboy movies. Invariably the hero, even though mortally wounded, would manage to save the day and rescue the heroine and/or the town.

Now it seems some stem cells perform the same function, dying in order to save the lives of others.

Researchers at Kings College in London were trying to better understand Graft vs Host Disease (GvHD), a potentially fatal complication that can occur when a patient receives a blood stem cell transplant. In cases of GvHD, the transplanted donor cells turn on the patient and attack their healthy cells and tissues.

Some previous research had found that using bone marrow cells called mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) had some success in combating GvHD. But it was unpredictable who it helped and why.

Working with mice, the Kings College team found that the MSCs were only effective if they died after being transplanted. It appears that it is only as they are dying that the MSCs engage with the individual’s immune system, telling it to stop attacking healthy tissues. The team also found that if they kill the MSCs just before transplanting them into mice, they were just as effective.

In a news article on HealthCanal, lead researcher Professor Francesco Dazzi, said the next step is to see if this will apply to, and help, people:

“The side effects of a stem cell transplant can be fatal and this factor is a serious consideration in deciding whether some people are suitable to undergo one. If we can be more confident that we can control these lethal complications in all patients, more people will be able to receive this life saving procedure. The next step will be to introduce clinical trials for patients with GvHD, either using the procedure only in patients with immune systems capable of killing mesenchymal stem cells, or killing these cells before they are infused into the patient, to see if this does indeed improve the success of treatment.”

The study is published in Science Translational Medicine.

Genetically modified blood stem cells reverse diabetes in mice (Todd Dubnicoff)

When functioning properly, the T cells of our immune system keep us healthy by detecting and killing off infected, damaged or cancerous cells in our body. But in the case of type 1 diabetes, a person’s own T cells turn against the body by mistakenly targeting and destroying perfectly normal islet cells in the pancreas, which are responsible for producing insulin. As a result, the insulin-dependent delivery of blood sugar to the energy-hungry organs is disrupted leading to many serious complications. Blood stem cell transplants have been performed to treat the disease by attempting to restart the immune system. The results have failed to provide a cure.

Now a new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, appears to explain why those previous attempts failed and how some genetic rejiggering could lead to a successful treatment for type 1 diabetes.

An analysis of the gene activity inside the blood stem cells of diabetic mice and humans reveals that these cells lack a protein called PD-L1. This protein is known to play an important role in putting the brakes on T cell activity. Because T cells are potent cell killers, it’s important for proteins like PD-L1 to keep the activated T cells in check.

Cell based image for t 1 diabetes

Credit: Andrea Panigada/Nancy Fliesler

Researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital hypothesized that adding back PD-L1 may prevent T cells from the indiscriminate killing of the body’s own insulin-producing cells. To test this idea, the research team genetically engineered mouse blood stem cells to produce the PD-L1 protein. Experiments with the cells in a petri dish showed that the addition of PD-L1 did indeed block the attack-on-self activity. And when these blood stem cells were transplanted into a diabetic mouse strain, the disease was reversed in most of the animals over the short term while a third of the mice had long-lasting benefits.

The researchers hope this targeting of PD-L1 production – which the researchers could also stimulate with pharmacological drugs – will contribute to a cure for type 1 diabetes.

FDA’s new guidelines for stem cell treatments

Gottlieb

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb

Yesterday Scott Gottlieb, the Commissioner at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), laid out some new guidelines for the way the agency regulates stem cells and regenerative medicine. The news was good for patients, not so good for clinics offering unproven treatments.

First the good. Gottlieb announced new guidelines encouraging innovation in the development of stem cell therapies, and faster pathways for therapies, that show they are both safe and effective, to reach the patient.

At the same time, he detailed new rules that provide greater clarity about what clinics can do with stem cells without incurring the wrath of the FDA. Those guidelines detail the limits on the kinds of procedures clinics can offer and what ways they can “manipulate” those cells. Clinics that go beyond those limits could be in trouble.

In making the announcement Gottlieb said:

“To be clear, we remain committed to ensuring that patients have access to safe and effective regenerative medicine products as efficiently as possible. We are also committed to making sure we take action against products being unlawfully marketed that pose a potential significant risk to their safety. The framework we’re announcing today gives us the solid platform we need to continue to take enforcement action against a small number of clearly unscrupulous actors.”

Many of the details in the announcement match what CIRM has been pushing for some years. Randy Mills, our previous President and CEO, called for many of these changes in an Op Ed he co-wrote with former US Senator Bill Frist.

Our hope now is that the FDA continues to follow this promising path and turns these draft proposals into hard policy.

 

CIRM & NIH: a dynamic duo to advance stem cell therapies

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NIH

National Institutes of Health

There’s nothing more flattering than to get an invitation, out of the blue, from someone you respect, and be told that they are interested in learning about the way you work, to see if it can help them improve the way they work.

That’s what happened to CIRM recently. I will let Randy Mills, who was our President & CEO at the time, pick up the story:

“Several weeks ago I got a call from the head of the National Heart. Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) asking would we be willing to come out to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and talk about what we have been doing, the changes we have made and the impact they are having.”

Apparently people at the NIH had been reading our Strategic Plan and our Annual Report and had been hearing good things about us from many different individuals and organizations. We also heard that they had been motivated to engage more fully with the regenerative medicine community following the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act.

We were expecting a sit down chat with them but we got a lot more than that. They blocked out one and a half days for us so that we had the time to engage in some in-depth, thoughtful conversations about how to advance the field.

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Dr. Francis Collins, NIH Director

The meeting was kicked off by both Francis Collins, the NIH Director, and Gary Gibbons, the NHLBI Director. Then the CIRM team – Dr. Mills, Dr. Maria Millan, Gabe Thompson and James Harrison – gave a series of presentations providing an overview of how CIRM operates, including our vision and strategic priorities, our current portfolio, the lessons learned so far, our plans for the future and the challenges we face.

The audience included the various heads and representatives from the various NIH Institutes who posed a series of questions for us to answer, such as:

  • What criteria do we use to determine if a project is ready for a clinical trial?
  • How do we measure success?
  • How have our strategies and priorities changed under CIRM 2.0?
  • How well are those strategies working?

The conversation went so well that the one day of planned meetings were expanded to two. Maria Millan, now our interim President & CEO, gave an enthusiastic summary of the talks

“The meetings were extremely productive!  After meeting with Dr. Collins’ group and the broader institute, we had additional sit down meetings.   The NIH representatives reported that they received such enthusiastic responses from Institute heads that they extended the meeting into a second day. We met with with the National Institutes of Dental and Craniofacial Research, Heart, Lung and Blood, Eye Institute, Institute on Aging, Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, Diabetes, and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.  We covered strategic and operational considerations for funding the best science in the stem cell and regenerative medicine space.  We explored potential avenues to join forces and leverage the assets and programs of both organizations, to accelerate the development of regenerative medicine and stem cell treatments.”

This was just a first meeting but it laid the groundwork for what we hope will be a truly productive partnership. In fact, shortly after returning from Washington, D.C., CIRM was immediately invited to follow-up NIH workgroups and meetings.

As this budding partnership progresses we’ll let you know how it’s working out.

Emotions and gratitude at changing of the guard at Stem Cell Agency

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RandyFarewellFamily

Randy Mills and his family

Randy, as regular readers of this blog know, is, or rather was, the President and CEO of CIRM. James Harrison is less well known to the outside world but his imprint on CIRM, as our General Counsel and one of the key figures behind Proposition 71, is even bigger than that of Randy’s.

Randy came to the stem cell agency a little over three years ago and in pretty quick order completely refashioned us. Under his guidance CIRM 2.0 became a sleek, streamlined funding machine, turning what had been an almost two-year process from application to funding into one that took just 120 days. He revamped the frequency with which we offered specific programs, making it more predictable and so easier for researchers to know when the next round was coming up. He helped usher in a new Strategic Plan that is a blueprint for us until 2020.

But the changes he implemented were not just about the way we worked, it was also about how we worked and particularly how we worked together. He turned the agency into a true team, one where everyone felt they not only had a role to play but that what they did was important in determining the success of the agency.

Not surprisingly there was no shortage of people ready to praise him. CIRM Board Chair Jonathan Thomas (JT) thanked Randy for turning the agency around, transforming it into an organization that even the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now looks to as a model (more on that in a subsequent blog). Vice Chair Art Torres thanked Randy for his leadership and for his compassion toward patients, always putting them first in everything that he and the agency did. Board member Sherry Lansing called Randy “a genius and visionary”.

But perhaps the most moving tributes came from patients advocates.

Don Reed said; “When I first met Randy I didn’t like him. I thought CIRM was one of the best, if not the best, organization out there and who was this person to say they were going to come in and make it better. Well, you did Randy and we are all so very grateful to you for that.”

Adrienne Shapiro from Axis Advocacy, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for sickle cell disease, presented Randy with the “Heart of a Mother” award, thanking him for his tireless support of patients and their families.

Jake Javier, a participant in the Asterias spinal cord injury trial, wrote a note saying: “You positively affect so many through your amazing funding efforts for life changing research, and should be very proud of that. But something I will always remember is how personal and genuine you were while doing it. I hope you got the chance to meet as many of the people you helped as possible because I know they would remember the same.”

Randy – who is leaving to become President/CEO of the National Marrow Donor/Be The Match program – was clearly deeply moved by the tributes, but reminded everyone that he was leaving us in good hands. The Board named Dr. Maria Millan as the interim President and CEO, pending a meeting of a search committee to determine the steps for appointing a permanent replacement.

Randy praised Maria for her intelligence, compassion and vision:

“Maria Millan has been a great partner in all that we have achieved at CIRM. She was a key part of developing the Strategic Plan; she  understands it inside out and has been responsible for administering it. She is a wonderful leader and is going to be absolutely phenomenal.”

JamesFarewell_1920x1080

James Harrison (left) with CIRM Board members Jonathan Thomas and Bert Lubin

The tributes for James Harrison were ever bit as moving. James has been a part of CIRM since before there was a CIRM. He helped draft Proposition 71, the ballot initiative that created the stem cell agency, and has played a key role since as General Counsel.

JT: “James has been a part of literally every decision and move that CIRM has made in its entire history. He’s been integral in everything. When I first came to CIRM, I was told by Bob Klein (JT’s predecessor as Chair) ‘Don’t brush your teeth without checking with James first’ suggesting a level of knowledge and expertise that was admirable.”

Jeff Sheehy “We would not be here without James. He organized the defense when we were sued by our opponents in the early days, through the various leadership challenges we had, all of the legal difficulties we had James was there to guide us and it’s been nothing short of extraordinary. Your brilliance and steadiness is amazing. While we are screaming and pulling our hair out there was James. Just saying his name makes me feel more relaxed.”

Sherry Lansing: “One thing I never worried about was our ethics, because you protected us at all times. You have such strong ethical values, you are always calm and rational and no matter what was going on you were always the rock who could explain things to everyone and deal with it with integrity.”

James is leaving to take a more active role in the law firm Remcho, Johansen & Purcell, where he is partner. Succeeding him as General Counsel is Scott Tocher, who has been at CIRM almost as long as James.

Randy; “To have someone like Scott come in and replace someone who wrote Proposition 71 speaks for the bench strength of the agency and how we are in very good hands.”

Art Torres joked “Scott has been waiting as long as Prince Charles has to take over the reins and we’re delighted to be able to work with him.”

We wish Randy and James great good luck in their next adventures.

 

CIRM’s Randy Mills leaving stem cell agency to take on new challenge

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Mills, Randy Union Tribune K.C. Alfred

Some news releases are fun to write. Some less so. The one that CIRM posted today definitely falls into that latter group. It announced that CIRM’s President and CEO, Randy Mills, is leaving us to take up the role of President and CEO at the National Marrow Donor Program – NMPD/Be The Match.

It’s a great opportunity for him but a big loss for us.

Be The Match is a non-profit organization that delivers cures to patients in need of a life-saving marrow or cord blood transplant. The organization operates the national Be The Match Registry®—the world’s largest listing of potential marrow donors and donated umbilical cord blood units—matches patients with their marrow donor, educates healthcare professionals and conducts research so more lives can be saved. The organization also recently created a subsidiary—Be The Match BioTherapiesSM—that supports organizations pursuing new life-saving treatments in cellular therapy.

Randy has been at CIRM since April 2014. In that time he has dramatically re-shaped the agency, and, more importantly, dramatically improved the speed with which we are able to fund research. It’s no exaggeration to say that Randy’s drive to create CIRM 2.0 was a radical overhaul of the way we work. It made it easier for researchers to apply to us for funding, made our funding cycles more consistent and the application process simpler – though no less rigorous.

As our CIRM Board Chair Jonathan Thomas said in the news release:

“CIRM has experienced a remarkable transformation since Randy’s arrival. He has taken the agency to a new level by developing and implementing a bold strategic plan, the results of which include an 82% reduction in approval time for clinical trial projects, a 3-fold increase in the number of clinical trials, and a 65% reduction in the time it takes to enroll those trials. The opportunity for Randy to lead a tremendously important organization such as the NMDP/Be The Match is consistent with the values he demonstrated at CIRM, which put the well-being of patients above all else. We shall miss him but know he will do great things at NMDP/Be The Match.”

From a personal perspective, what most impressed me about Randy was his willingness to involve every person in the agency in changing the way we work. He could easily have come in and simply issued orders and told people what to do. Instead he invited every person at CIRM to sit in on the meetings that were shaping the new direction we took. You didn’t have to go, but if you did you were expected to offer thoughts and ideas. No sitting idly by.

Those meetings not only changed the direction of the agency, they also re-energized the agency. When people feel their voice is being heard, that their opinion has value, they respond by working harder and smarter.

The CIRM of today has the same mission as always – accelerating stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs – but the people working here seem to have a renewed commitment to making that mission a reality.

Randy brought to CIRM energy and a renewed sense of purpose, along with some truly terrible jokes and a strange conviction that he could have been a great rock and roll drummer (suffice to say he made the right career choice when he went into research).

He changed us as an agency, for the better. We shall miss him, but know he will do great things in his new role at NMDP/Be The Match and we wish him success in his new job, and his family great joy in their new home.

MariaM-085-Edit

Maria Millan

Randy will be with us till the end of June and starting July 1st Dr. Maria Millan will take on the role of interim President and CEO.

 

 

 

Partnering with the best to help find cures for rare diseases

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As a state agency we focus most of our efforts and nearly all our money on California. That’s what we were set up to do. But that doesn’t mean we don’t also look outside the borders of California to try and find the best research, and the most promising therapies, to help people in need.

Today’s meeting of the CIRM Board was the first time we have had a chance to partner with one of the leading research facilities in the country focusing on children and rare diseases; St. Jude Children’s Researech Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

a4da990e3de7a2112ee875fc784deeafSt. Jude is getting $11.9 million to run a Phase I/II clinical trial for x-linked severe combined immunodeficiency disorder (SCID), a catastrophic condition where children are born without a functioning immune system. Because they are unable to fight off infections, many children born with SCID die in the first few years of life.

St. Jude is teaming up with researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to genetically modify the patient’s own blood stem cells, hopefully creating a new blood system and repairing the damaged immune system. St. Jude came up with the method of doing this, UCSF will treat the patients. Having that California component to the clinical trial is what makes it possible for us to fund this work.

This is the first time CIRM has funded work with St. Jude and reflects our commitment to moving the most promising research into clinical trials in people, regardless of whether that work originates inside or outside California.

The Board also voted to fund researchers at Cedars-Sinai to run a clinical trial on ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Like SCID, ALS is a rare disease. As Randy Mills, our President and CEO, said in a news release:

CIRM CEO and President, Randy Mills.

CIRM CEO and President, Randy Mills.

“While making a funding decision at CIRM we don’t just look at how many people are affected by a disease, we also look at the severity of the disease on the individual and the potential for impacting other diseases. While the number of patients afflicted by these two diseases may be small, their need is great. Additionally, the potential to use these approaches in treating other disease is very real. The underlying technology used in treating SCID, for example, has potential application in other areas such as sickle cell disease and HIV/AIDS.”

We have written several blogs about the research that cured children with SCID.

The Board also approved funding for a clinical trial to develop a treatment for type 1 diabetes (T1D). This is an autoimmune disease that affects around 1.25 million Americans, and millions more around the globe.

T1D is where the body’s own immune system attacks the cells that produce insulin, which is needed to control blood sugar levels. If left untreated it can result in serious, even life-threatening, complications such as vision loss, kidney damage and heart attacks.

Researchers at Caladrius Biosciences will take cells, called regulatory T cells (Tregs), from the patient’s own immune system, expand the number of those cells in the lab and enhance them to make them more effective at preventing the autoimmune attack on the insulin-producing cells.

The focus is on newly-diagnosed adolescents because studies show that at the time of diagnosis T1D patients usually have around 20 percent of their insulin-producing cells still intact. It’s hoped by intervening early the therapy can protect those cells and reduce the need for patients to rely on insulin injections.

David J. Mazzo, Ph.D., CEO of Caladrius Biosciences, says this is hopeful news for people with type 1 diabetes:

David Mazzo

David Mazzo

“We firmly believe that this therapy has the potential to improve the lives of people with T1D and this grant helps us advance our Phase 2 clinical study with the goal of determining the potential for CLBS03 to be an effective therapy in this important indication.”

 

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Stem cell heroes: patients who had life-saving, life-changing treatments inspire CIRM Board

/ Kevin McCormack / 7 Comments

 

Christian & Alysia Padilla-Vaccaro with daughters Annabella and Evangelina, Randy Mills, Isabelle Javier and son Jake, CIRM Board Vice Chair Art Torres, Vita Trede, Karl Trede, Brenden Whittaker, Becky Whittaker, CIRM Board Chair Jonathan Thomas ,

It’s not an easy thing to bring an entire Board of Directors to tears, but four extraordinary people and their families managed to do just that at the last CIRM Board meeting of 2016.

The four are patients who have undergone life-saving or life-changing stem cell therapies that were funded by our agency. The patients and their families shared their stories with the Board as part of CIRM President & CEO Randy Mill’s preview of our Annual Report, a look back at our achievements over the last year.

The four included:

jake_javier_stories_of_hope

Jake Javier, whose life changed in a heartbeat the day before he graduated high school, when he dove into a swimming pool and suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down. A stem cell transplant is giving him hope he may regain the use of his arms and hands.

 

 

karl

Karl Trede who had just recovered from one life-threatening disease when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and became the first person ever treated with a new anti-tumor therapy that helped hold the disease at bay.

 

brenden_stories_of_hopeBrenden Whittaker, born with a rare immune disorder that left his body unable to fight off bacterial or fungal infections. Repeated infections cost Brenden part of his lung and liver and almost killed him. A stem cell treatment that gave him a healthy immune system cured him.

 

 

evangelinaEvangelina Padilla Vaccaro was born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), also known as “bubbly baby” disease, which left her unable to fight off infections. Her future looked grim until she got a stem cell transplant that gave her a new blood system and a healthy immune system. Today, she is cured.

 

 

Normally CIRM Board meetings are filled with important, albeit often dry, matters such as approving new intellectual property regulations or a new research concept plan. But it’s one thing to vote to approve a clinical trial, and a very different thing to see the people whose lives you have helped change by funding that trial.

You cannot help but be deeply moved when you hear a mother share her biggest fear that her daughter would never live long enough to go to kindergarten and is now delighted to see her lead a normal life; or hear a young man who wondered if he would make it to his 24th birthday now planning to go to college to be a doctor

When you know you played a role in making these dreams happen, it’s impossible not to be inspired, and doubly determined to do everything possible to ensure many others like them have a similar chance at life.

You can read more about these four patients in our new Stories of Hope: The CIRM Stem Cell Four feature on the CIRM website. Additionally, here is a video of those four extraordinary people and their families telling their stories:

We will have more extraordinary stories to share with you when we publish our Annual Report on January 1st. 2016 was a big year for CIRM. We are determined to make 2017 even bigger.