CIRM 2.0

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: 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: Let’s start at the beginning shall we

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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.

A word from our Chair, several in fact

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

In 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary named “podcast” its word of the year. At the time a podcast was something many had heard of but not that many actually tuned in to. My how times have changed. Now there are some two million podcasts to chose from, at least according to the New York Times, and who am I to question them.

Yesterday, in the same New York Times, TV writer Margaret Lyons, wrote about how the pandemic helped turn her from TV to podcasts: “Much in the way I grew to prefer an old-fashioned phone call to a video chat, podcasts, not television, became my go-to medium in quarantine. With their shorter lead times and intimate production values, they felt more immediate and more relevant than ever before.”

I mention this because an old colleague of ours at CIRM, Neil Littman, has just launched his own podcast and the first guest on it was Jonathan Thomas, Chair of the CIRM Board. Their conversation ranged from CIRM’s past to the future of the regenerative field as a whole, with a few interesting diversions along the way. It’s fun listening. And as Margaret Lyons said it might be more immediate and more relevant than ever before.

A model for success

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Dr. Maria Millan, CIRM’s President & CEO

Funding models are rarely talked about in excited tones.  It’s normally relegated to the dry tomes of academia. But in CIRM’s case, the funding model we have created is not just fundamental to our success in advancing regenerative medicine in California, it’s also proving to be a model that many other agencies are looking at to see if they can replicate it.

A recent article in the journal Cell & Gene Therapy Insights looks at what the CIRM model does and how it has achieved something rather extraordinary.

Full disclosure. I might be a tad biased here as the article was written by my boss, Dr. Maria Millan, and two of my colleagues, Dr. Sohel Talib and Dr. Shyam Patel.

I won’t go into huge detail here (you can get that by reading the article itself) But the article “highlights 3 elements of CIRM’s funding model that have enabled California academic researchers and companies to de-risk development of novel regenerative medicine therapies and attract biopharma industry support.”

Those three elements are:

1. Ensuring that funding mechanisms bridge the entire translational “Valley of Death”

2. Constantly optimizing funding models to meet the needs of a rapidly evolving industry

3. Championing the portfolio and proactively engaging potential industry partners

As an example of the first, they point to our Disease Team awards. These were four-year investments that gave researchers with promising projects the time, support and funds they needed to not only develop a therapy, but also move it out of academia into a company and into patients.  Many of these projects had struggled to get outside investment until CIRM stepped forward. One example they offer is this one.

“CIRM Disease Team award funding also enabled Dr. Irving Weissman and the Stanford University team to discover, develop and obtain first-in-human clinical data for the innovative anti-CD47 antibody immunotherapy approach to cancer. The spin-out, Forty Seven, Inc., then leveraged CIRM funding as well as venture and public market financing to progress clinical development of the lead candidate until its acquisition by Gilead Sciences in April 2020 for $4.9B.”

But as the field evolved it became clear CIRM’s funding model had to evolve too, to better meet the needs of a rapidly advancing industry. So, in 2015 we changed the way we worked. For example, with clinical trial stage projects we reduced the average time from application to funding from 22 months to 120 days. In addition to that applications for new clinical stage projects were able to be submitted year-round instead of only once or twice a year as in the past.

We also created hard and fast milestones for all programs to reach. If they met their milestone funding continued. If they didn’t, funding stopped. And we required clinical trial stage projects, and those for earlier stage for-profit companies, to put up money of their own. We wanted to ensure they had “skin in the game” and were as committed to the success of their project as we were.

Finally, to champion the portfolio we created our Industry Alliance Program. It’s a kind of dating program for the researchers CIRM funds and companies looking to invest in promising projects. Industry partners get a chance to look at our portfolio and pick out projects they think are interesting. We then make the introductions and see if we can make a match.

And we have.

“To date, the IAP has also formally enrolled 8 partners with demonstrated commitment to cell and gene therapy development. The enrolled IAP partners represent companies both small and large, multi-national venture firms and innovative accelerators.

Over the past 18 months, the IAP program has enabled over 50 one-on-one partnership interactions across CIRM’s portfolio from discovery stage pluripotent stem cell therapies to clinical stage engineered HSC therapies.”

As the field continues to mature there are new problems emerging, such as the need to create greater manufacturing capacity to meet the growth in demand for high quality stem cell products. CIRM, like all other agencies, will also have to evolve and adapt to these new demands. But we feel with the model we have created, and the flexibility we have to pivot when needed, we are perfectly situated to do just that.

Charting a new course for stem cell research

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

What are the latest advances in stem cell research targeting cancer? Can stem cells help people battling COVID-19 or even help develop a vaccine to stop the virus? What are researchers and the scientific community doing to help address the unmet medical needs of underserved communities? Those are just a few of the topics being discussed at the Annual CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network Symposium on Thursday, October 8th from 9am to 1.30pm PDT.

Like pretty nearly everything these days the symposium is going to be a virtual event, so you can watch it from the comfort of your own home on a phone or laptop. And it’s free.

The CIRM Alpha Clinics are a network of leading medical centers here in California. They specialize in delivering stem cell and gene therapies to patients. So, while many conferences look at the promise of stem cell therapies, here we deal with the reality; what’s in the clinic, what’s working, what do we need to do to help get these therapies to patients in need?

It’s a relatively short meeting, with short presentations, but that doesn’t mean it will be short on content. Some of the best stem cell researchers in the U.S. are taking part so you’ll learn an awful lot in a short time.

We’ll hear what’s being done to find therapies for

  • Rare diseases that affect children
  • Type 1 diabetes
  • HIV/AIDS
  • Glioblastoma
  • Multiple myeloma

We’ll discuss how to create a patient navigation system that can address social and economic determinants that impact patient participation? And we’ll look at ways that the Alpha Clinic Network can partner with community care givers around California to increase patient access to the latest therapies.

It’s going to be a fascinating day. And did I mention it’s free!

All you have to do is go to this Eventbrite page to register.

And feel free to share this with your family, friends or anyone you think might be interested.

We look forward to seeing you there.

A brief history of the Stem Cell Agency

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

On Wednesday, August 15 the California State Assembly Select Committee on Biotechnology held an informational hearing on CIRM as part of its mission of ensuring the legislature is up to date and informed about the biotech industry in California. The committee heard from CIRM’s President and CEO Dr. Maria T. Millan and the Vice Chair of our Board, Senator Art Torres (Ret.); two of CIRM’s Patient Advocates (Pawash Priyank and Don Reed) and Dr. Jan Nolta, the Director of the Institute for Regenerative Cures at UC Davis.

The final speaker was David Jensen, whose California Stem Cell Report blog has charted the history of CIRM since its inception. At CIRM we know that not everyone agrees with us all the time, or supports all the decisions we have made in the years since we were approved by voters in 2004, but we do pride ourselves on being open to a thoughtful, vigorous debate on all aspects of stem cell research. David’s presentation to the committee was nothing if not thoughtful, and we thought you might enjoy reading it and so we are presenting it here in its entirety.

For those who prefer to watch than read, here is a video of the entire hearing:

https://www.assembly.ca.gov/media/assembly-select-committee-biotechnology-20180815/video

California’s Stem Cell “Gold Rush:” A Brief Overview of the State’s $3 Billion Stem Cell Agency
Prepared testimony by David Jensen, publisher/editor of the California Stem Cell Report, before the Assembly Select Committee on Biotechnology, Aug. 15, 2018
I was in Mazatlan in Mexico in the fall of 2004 when I first heard about the creation of
California’s stem cell agency. I was reading the Wall Street Journal online and saw a headline that said a new Gold Rush was about to begin in California — this one involving stem cells instead of nuggets.

“Holy Argonauts,” I said to myself, using the term, of course, that refers to the tens of thousands of people who rushed to the California gold fields in 1849. I wanted to know more about what was likely to happen with this new stem cell gold rush.

Today, nearly 14 years later, I still want to know more about the California Institute for
Regenerative Medicine or CIRM, as the agency is formally known. But I can tell you that certain facts are clear.

Borrowing and Autonomy
The agency is unique in California history and among the states throughout the nation. It is the first state agency to fund scientific research with billions of dollars – all of it borrowed. At one point in its history, it is safe to say that the agency was the largest single source of funding in the world for human embryonic stem cell research.

The agency operates with financial and oversight autonomy that is rare in California government, courtesy of the ballot initiative that created it. But that measure also proved to be both a blessing and a curse. The agency’s financial autonomy has allowed it to provide a reasonably steady stream of cash over a number of years, something that is necessary to sustain the long-term research that is critical for development of widely available treatments.

At the same time, the ballot measure carried the agency’s death warrant — no more money after the $3 billion was gone. Cash for new awards is now expected to run out at the end of next year. Over its life, the agency has had a national and somewhat more modestly global impact, both as a source of funding and international cooperation, but also in staying the course on human embryonic stem cell research when the federal government was backing away from it.

Beyond that, the stem cell agency is the only state department whose primary objective is to produce a marketable commercial product. In this case, a cure or treatment for afflictions now nearly untreatable.

Finally, I am all but certain that CIRM is the only state agency that takes back money when a project winds up on the rocks. By the end of last month, that figure totalled in recent years more than $34 million in two big categories of awards. This sort of cash recovery is not a practice that occurs with federal research dollars. With CIRM the money goes back into the pot for more research aimed at treating horrible afflictions.

Evaluations of the Research Effort
Nonetheless the agency has hit some shoals from time to time. In 2010, the agency’s governing board commissioned a $700,000 study of its efforts by the prestigious Institute of Medicine. Two years later, the IOM reported to CIRM that it had some significant flaws.

The IOM study said that the agency had “achieved many notable results.” But it also
recommended sweeping changes to remove conflict of interest problems, clean up a troubling dual-executive arrangement and fundamentally change the nature of the governing board.

The report said,“Far too many board members represent organizations that receive CIRM funding or benefit from that funding. These competing personal and professional interests compromise the perceived independence of the ICOC (the CIRM governing board), introduce potential bias into the board’s decision making, and threaten to undermine confidence in the board.”

The conflict issues are built in by the ballot measure, which gave potential recipient institutions seats on the 29-member governing board. Indeed, in 2017, the last time I calculated the correlation between the board and awards, roughly 90 percent of the money given out by CIRM had gone to institutions with ties to members of the governing board.

About two months after the IOM presented its report, the CIRM board approved a new policy that bars 13 of its 29 members from voting on any grants whatsoever to help deal with questions concerning conflicts of interest on the board.

Other studies about the agency’s performance resulted from a 2010 law in which the legislature modified the initiative to require triennial performance audits that would be paid for by the agency itself. The requirement specifically excluded “scientific performance” from the audit.

The first audit results came in 2012 and contained 27 recommendations for improvement. The most recent performance audit came last spring. The audit firm, Moss Adams, recommended improvements in the areas of private fund-raising, retention of staff and better utilization of board members. The board was told that the agency had made “incredible progress” and that the auditors “usually see a lot of good things.”

The Story of CIRM 2.0
In recent years the agency has been on a self-improvement regime. The effort began in 2014 and was dubbed CIRM 2.0 — a term that was originally coined by a stem cell researcher at UC Davis.

The new direction and emphasis was described by the agency as “radical.” It was aimed at improving speed, efficiency and innovation. And it seems to have largely succeeded.
In 2014, it took almost two years for a good idea to go from application to the final funding stage. The goal was to shorten that to 120 days. Delays in funding are of particular concern to businesses, often for cash flow reasons, but they also mean delays in actually developing a treatment.

This week, the agency said the cash delivery figure now stands at less than 90 days for clinical awards and about 120 days for translational awards.

In 2014, the agency was participating in nine clinical trials, the last stage before a treatment is certified by the federal government for widespread use. Today the agency is involved in 49. In 2014, about 50 patients were involved in those trials. Today the figure is more than 800.

One of the more interesting aspects of CIRM 2.0 marked a departure from what might be called an academic pass-fail approach to the “final exam” for applications from scientists. Instead, CIRM is engaged in a more partner-oriented approach that can be found in some businesses.

Instead of flatly failing an application that is not quite ready for prime time, the idea is to coach applicants along to help bring them up to approval level. Today the agency can count 30 applications that won approval through that process. All of which is work could have slipped away in the more distant past.

CIRM and the Biotech Biz
CIRM is now much more engaged with industry than during its earlier years, when it drew bitter criticism from some business executives. Engagement with biotech firms is critical to bringing a treatment to the public. CIRM is not in the business of actually manufacturing, marketing and selling products. That is a matter left to the private sector.

One reason for closer business connections involves maturation of the work in the field, which has brought research closer to reality. But it is also due to a different focus within the agency as top management has changed.

One of the more difficult areas involving stem cell research and likely treatments is their cost. It is rare to hear researchers or companies talk forthrightly in public about specific dollar amounts. But the cost of drugs and treatment are high visibility matters for patients and elected officials. And estimates of stem cell treatments have run up to at least $900,000.

In 2010, the California legislature moved to help assure affordability by requiring grantees to submit affordable access plans with the caveat that the agency could waive that requirement. How that will ultimately play out as actual products come into the marketplace is yet to be determined.

The Public Policy Questions
A number of significant public policy questions surround the California’s stem cell program involving its creation and execution. They include:
● Is a ballot initiative the best way to approach research and create new state programs?
The initiative is very difficult to alter when changes are needed or priorities change. .
● Does the state have higher health priorities, such as prenatal health care, than supplying
researchers with cash that they could well secure from other sources?
● Is borrowing money to finance the research the best way to go about it? The interest
expense raise the total cost of a $20 million research award to $40 million.
● Should executives of potential recipient institutions serve on the board that awards their employers hundreds of millions of dollars?

This is just a short list of some of the policy matters. Other questions can and should be asked in the wake of the agency’s nearly 14 years of work.

Lives Saved but No Widespread Therapies
Returning to our earlier list of the clear facts about CIRM, another fact is that lives have been saved as the result of clinical trials that the agency it has helped to finance. The youngster from Folsom mentioned earlier in this hearing is one of a number of cases.

That said, these patients received treatment in clinical trials, which may or may not succeed in producing a commercial product that is available to the general public.

Little doubt exists that the agency has advanced the stem cell field and is building towards a critical mass in California. The burgeoning research program at UC Davis, with $138 million in CIRM funding, is one example. Another is the $50 million Alpha Clinic network aimed at creating powerful collaboration within institutions and throughout the state. In addition to Davis, UC San Francisco, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and the City of Hope in the Los Angeles area are all part of the Alpha network.

Nonetheless, CIRM has not yet backed a stem cell treatment that is ready for widespread use and fulfilled the voter expectations from 2004 that stem cell cures were right around the corner.

The agency itself also has something of a deadline that is right around the corner in political and scientific terms. Backers of the agency are hoping for another ballot initiative in November 2020 that would pump $5 billion into the program and stave off its slow demise as research winds down. Development of a stem cell treatment that would resonate with voters would be an invaluable development to encourage voters to continue this unique experiment — even if California’s stem cell gold rush does not quite measure up to the dramatic events of 169 years ago.
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CIRM Board invests in three new stem cell clinical trials targeting arthritis, cancer and deadly infections

/ Kevin McCormack / 8 Comments

knee

Arthritis of the knee

Every day at CIRM we get calls from people looking for a stem cell therapy to help them fight a life-threatening or life-altering disease or condition. One of the most common calls is about osteoarthritis, a painful condition where the cartilage that helps cushion our joints is worn away, leaving bone to rub on bone. People call asking if we have something, anything, that might be able to help them. Now we do.

At yesterday’s CIRM Board meeting the Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee or ICOC (the formal title of the Board) awarded almost $8.5 million to the California Institute for Biomedical Research (CALIBR) to test a drug that appears to help the body regenerate cartilage. In preclinical tests the drug, KA34, stimulated mesenchymal stem cells to turn into chondrocytes, the kind of cell found in healthy cartilage. It’s hoped these new cells will replace those killed off by osteoarthritis and repair the damage.

This is a Phase 1 clinical trial where the goal is primarily to make sure this approach is safe in patients. If the treatment also shows hints it’s working – and of course we hope it will – that’s a bonus which will need to be confirmed in later stage, and larger, clinical trials.

From a purely selfish perspective, it will be nice for us to be able to tell callers that we do have a clinical trial underway and are hopeful it could lead to an effective treatment. Right now the only alternatives for many patients are powerful opioids and pain killers, surgery, or turning to clinics that offer unproven stem cell therapies.

Targeting immune system cancer

The CIRM Board also awarded Poseida Therapeutics $19.8 million to target multiple myeloma, using the patient’s own genetically re-engineered stem cells. Multiple myeloma is caused when plasma cells, which are a type of white blood cell found in the bone marrow and are a key part of our immune system, turn cancerous and grow out of control.

As Dr. Maria Millan, CIRM’s President & CEO, said in a news release:

“Multiple myeloma disproportionately affects people over the age of 65 and African Americans, and it leads to progressive bone destruction, severe anemia, infectious complications and kidney and heart damage from abnormal proteins produced by the malignant plasma cells.  Less than half of patients with multiple myeloma live beyond 5 years. Poseida’s technology is seeking to destroy these cancerous myeloma cells with an immunotherapy approach that uses the patient’s own engineered immune system T cells to seek and destroy the myeloma cells.”

In a news release from Poseida, CEO Dr. Eric Ostertag, said the therapy – called P-BCMA-101 – holds a lot of promise:

“P-BCMA-101 is elegantly designed with several key characteristics, including an exceptionally high concentration of stem cell memory T cells which has the potential to significantly improve durability of response to treatment.”

Deadly infections

The third clinical trial funded by the Board yesterday also uses T cells. Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles were awarded $4.8 million for a Phase 1 clinical trial targeting potentially deadly infections in people who have a weakened immune system.

Viruses such as cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr, and adenovirus are commonly found in all of us, but our bodies are usually able to easily fight them off. However, patients with weakened immune systems resulting from chemotherapy, bone marrow or cord blood transplant often lack that ability to combat these viruses and it can prove fatal.

The researchers are taking T cells from healthy donors that have been genetically matched to the patient’s immune system and engineered to fight these viruses. The cells are then transplanted into the patient and will hopefully help boost their immune system’s ability to fight the virus and provide long-term protection.

Whenever you can tell someone who calls you, desperately looking for help, that you have something that might be able to help them, you can hear the relief on the other end of the line. Of course, we explain that these are only early-stage clinical trials and that we don’t know if they’ll work. But for someone who up until that point felt they had no options and, often, no hope, it’s welcome and encouraging news that progress is being made.