At first glance Lauren Miller Rogen and Dr. David Higgins seem an unlikely pair. She’s an actor, writer, director and has worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. He has a doctorate in molecular biology and genetics and has worked at some of the most well-known companies in biotech. But together they make a great team.
Lauren and David are both on the CIRM Board. She’s a patient advocate for Alzheimer’s and the driving force (with her husband Seth) of HFC (Hilarity for Charity), which has raised millions of dollars to help families battling the disease and to educate young people about the condition. It’s also made a lot of people laugh along the way. David is a patient advocate for Parkinson’s and has been instrumental is creating support groups that help patients and families cope with the disease.
Two voices, one message, watch out for predatory stem cell clinics
Last week two new papers came out echoing each other about the dangers of bogus “therapies” being offered by predatory stem cell clinics and the risks they pose to patients.
The first was from the Pew Charitable Trusts entitled: ‘Harms Linked to Unapproved Stem Cell Interventions Highlight Need for Greater FDA Enforcement’ with a subtitle: ‘Unproven regenerative medical products have led to infections, disabilities, and deaths.’
That pretty much says everything you need to know about the report, and in pretty stark terms; need for greater FDA enforcement and infections, disabilities and deaths.
Just two days later, as if in response to the call for greater enforcement, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came out with its own paper titled: ‘Important Patient and Consumer Information About Regenerative Medicine Therapies.’ Like the Pew report the FDA’s paper highlighted the dangers of unproven and unapproved “therapies” saying it “has received reports of blindness, tumor formation, infections, and more… due to the use of these unapproved products.”
The FDA runs down a list of diseases and conditions that predatory clinics claim they can cure without any evidence that what they offer is even safe, let alone effective. It says Regenerative Medicine therapies have not been approved for the treatment of:
Arthritis, osteoarthritis, rheumatism, hip pain, knee pain or shoulder pain.
Blindness or vision loss, autism, chronic pain or fatigue.
Neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Heart disease, lung disease or stroke.
The FDA says it has warned clinics offering these “therapies” to stop or face the risk of legal action, and it warns consumers: “Please know that if you are being charged for these products or offered these products outside of a clinical trial, you are likely being deceived and offered a product illegally.”
It tells consumers if you are offered one of these therapies – often at great personal cost running into the thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars – you should contact the FDA at ocod@fda.hhs.gov.
The Pew report highlights just how dangerous these “therapies” are for patients. They did a deep dive into health records and found that between 2004 and September 2020 there were more than 360 reported cases of patients experiencing serious side effects from a clinic that offered unproven and unapproved stem cell procedures.
Those side effects include 20 deaths as well as serious and even lifelong disabilities such as:
Partial or complete blindness (9).
Paraplegia (1).
Pulmonary embolism (6).
Heart attack (5).
Tumors, lesions, or other growths (16).
Organ damage or failure in several cases that resulted in death.
More than one hundred of the patients identified had to be hospitalized.
The most common type of procedures these patients were given were stem cells taken from their own body and then injected into their eye, spine, hip, shoulder, or knee. The second most common was stem cells from a donor that were then injected.
The Pew report cites the case of one California-based stem cell company that sold products manufactured without proper safety measures, “including a failure to properly screen for communicable diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B and C.” Those products led to at least 13 people being hospitalized due to serious bacterial infection in Texas, Arizona, Kansas, and Florida.
Shocking as these statistics are, the report says this is probably a gross under count of actual harm caused by the bogus clinics. It says the clinics themselves rarely report adverse events and many patients don’t report them either, unless they are so serious that they require medical intervention.
The Pew report concludes by saying the FDA needs more resources so it can more effectively act against these clinics and shut them down when necessary. It says the agency needs to encourage doctors and patients to report any unexpected side effects, saying: “devising effective strategies to collect more real-world evidence of harm can help the agency in its efforts to curb the growth of this unregulated market and ensure that the regenerative medicine field develops into one that clinicians and patients can trust and safely access.”
We completely support both reports and will continue to work with the FDA and anyone else opposed to these predatory clinics. You can read more here about what we have been doing to oppose these clinics, and here is information that will help inform your decision if you are thinking about taking part in a stem cell clinical trial but are not sure if it’s a legitimate one.
Every so often you hear a story and your first reaction is “oh, I have to share this with someone, anyone, everyone.” That’s what happened to me the other day.
I was talking with Kristin MacDonald, an amazing woman, a fierce patient advocate and someone who took part in a CIRM-funded clinical trial to treat retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The disease had destroyed Kristin’s vision and she was hoping the therapy, pioneered by jCyte, would help her. Kristin, being a bit of a pioneer herself, was the first person to test the therapy in the U.S.
Anyway, Kristin was doing a Zoom presentation and wanted to look her best so she asked a friend to come over and do her hair and makeup. The woman she asked, was Rosie Barrero, another patient in that RP clinical trial. Not so very long ago Rosie was legally blind. Now, here she was helping do her friend’s hair and makeup. And doing it beautifully too.
That’s when you know the treatment works. At least for Rosie.
There are many other stories to be heard – from patients and patient advocates, from researchers who develop therapies to the doctors who deliver them. – at our CIRM 2020 Grantee Meeting on next Monday September 14th Tuesday & September 15th.
It’s two full days of presentations and discussions on everything from heart disease and cancer, to COVID-19, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and spina bifida. Here’s a link to the Eventbrite page where you can find out more about the event and also register to be part of it.
Like pretty much everything these days it’s a virtual event so you’ll be able to join in from the comfort of your kitchen, living room, even the backyard.
And it’s free!
You can join us for all two days or just one session on one day. The choice is yours. And feel free to tell your friends or anyone else you think might be interested.
You know you are working with some of the finest scientific minds in the world when they get elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS). It’s the science equivalent of the baseball, football or even Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. People only get in if their peers vote them in. It’s considered one of the highest honors in science, one earned over many decades of hard work. And when it comes to hard work there are few people who work harder than U.C. San Diego’s Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, one of the newly elected members of the NAS.
For more than 25 years Larry’s work has targeted the brain and, in particular, Alzheimer’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
In 2012 his team was the first to create stem cell models for two different forms of Alzheimer’s, the hereditary and the sporadic forms. This gave researchers a new way of studying the disease, helping them better understand what causes it and looking at new ways of treating it.
His work has also helped develop a deeper understanding of the genetics of Alzheimer’s and to identify possible new targets for stem cell and other therapies.
Larry was typically modest when he heard the news, saying: “I have been very fortunate to have wonderful graduate students and fellows who have accomplished a great deal of excellent research. It is a great honor for me and for all of my past students and fellows – I am obviously delighted and hope to contribute to the important work of the National Academy of Sciences.”
But Larry doesn’t intend to rest on his laurels. He says he still has a lot of work to do, including “raising funding to test a new drug approach for Alzheimer’s disease that we’ve developed with CIRM support.”
Jennifer Briggs Braswell, PhD, worked with Larry at UCSD from 2005 to 2018. She says Larry’s election to the NAS is well deserved:
“His high quality publications, the pertinence of his studies in neurodegeneration to our current problems, and his constant, unwavering devotion to the next generation of scientists is matched only by his dedication to improving public understanding of science to motivate social, political, and financial support.
“He has been for me a supportive mentor, expressing enthusiastic belief in the likely success of my good ideas and delivering critique with kindness and sympathy. He continues to inspire me, our colleagues at UCSD and other communities, advocate publicly for the importance of science, and work tirelessly on solutions for neurodegenerative disorders.”
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, one of the few bright spots is how many researchers are stepping up and trying to find new ways to tackle it, to treat it and hopefully even cure it. Unfortunately, there are also those who are simply trying to cash in on it.
In the last few years the number of predatory clinics offering so-called “stem cell therapies” for everything from Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis to autism and arthritis has exploded in the US. The products they offer have not undergone a clinical trial to show that they work; they haven’t been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA); they don’t have any evidence they are even safe. But that doesn’t stop them marketing these claims and it isn’t stopping some of them from now trying to cash in on the fears created by the coronavirus.
One company is hawking what it calls a rapid COVID-19 test, one that can determine if you have the virus in under ten minutes (many current tests take days to produce a result). All it takes is a few drops of blood and, from the comfort of your own home, you get to find out if you are positive for COVID-19. And best of all, it claims it is 99 percent accurate.
What could be the problem with that? A lot as it turns out.
If you go to the bottom of the page on the website marketing the test it basically says “this does not work and we’re not making any claims or are in any way responsible for any results it produces.” So much for 99 percent accurate.
It’s not the only example of this kind of shameless attempt to cash in on COVID-19. So it’s appropriate that this week the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM), issued a statement strongly condemning these attempts and the clinics behind them.
ARM warns about the growing number of “stem cell clinics” (that) are taking advantage of the “hype” around stem cells – and, in certain cases, the current concern about COVID-19 – and avoiding regulation by falsely marketing illegal and potentially harmful products to patients seeking cures.”
These so called “therapies” or tests do more than just take money – in some cases tens of thousands of dollars – from individuals: “Public health is at risk when unscrupulous providers offer stem cell products that are unapproved, unproven and fail to adhere to established rules for good manufacturing practices. Many of these providers put patients at risk by falsely marketing the benefits of treatments, and often promoting the stem cells for conditions that are outside of their area of medical expertise.”
It’s sad that even in times when so many people are working hard to find treatments for the virus, and many are risking their lives caring for those who have the virus, that there are unscrupulous people trying to make money out of it. All we can do is be mindful, be careful and be suspicious of anything that sounds too good to be true.
There are no miracle cures. No miracle treatments. No rapid blood tests you can order in the mail. Be aware. And most importantly of all, be safe.
The CIRM Board recently held a meeting to approve $5 million in emergency funding for rapid research into potential treatments for COVID-19.
Way back in 2013, the CIRM Board invested $32 million in a project to create an iPSC Bank. The goal was simple; to collect tissue samples from people who have different diseases, turn those samples into high quality stem cell lines – the kind known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) – and create a facility where those lines can be stored and distributed to researchers who need them.
Fast forward almost seven years and that idea has now become the largest public iPSC bank in the world. The story of how that happened is the subject of a great article (by CIRM’s Dr. Stephen Lin) in the journal Science Direct.
Dr. Stephen Lin
In 2013 there was a real need for the bank. Scientists around the world were doing important research but many were creating the cells they used for that research in different ways. That made it hard to compare one study to another and come up with any kind of consistent finding. The iPSC Bank was designed to change that by creating one source for high quality cells, collected, processed and stored under a single, consistent method.
Tissue samples – either blood or skin – were collected from thousands of individuals around California. Each donor underwent a thorough consent process – including being shown a detailed brochure – to explain what iPS cells are and how the research would be done.
The diseases to be studied through this bank include:
Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD)
Alzheimer’s disease
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
Cardiomyopathies (heart conditions)
Cerebral Palsy
Diabetic Retinopathy
Epilepsy
Fatty Liver diseases
Hepatitis C (HCV)
Intellectual Disabilities
Primary Open Angle Glaucoma
Pulmonary Fibrosis
The samples were screened to make sure they were safe – for example the blood was tested for HBV and HIV – and then underwent rigorous quality control testing to make sure they met the highest standards.
Once approved the samples were then turned into iPSCs at a special facility at the Buck Institute in Novato and those lines were then made available to researchers around the world, both for-profit and non-profit entities.
Scientists are now able to use these cells for a wide variety of uses including disease modeling, drug discovery, drug development, and transplant studies in animal research models. It gives them a greater ability to study how a disease develops and progresses and to help discover and test new drugs or other therapies
The Bank, which is now run by FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics, has become a powerful resource for studying genetic variation between individuals, helping scientists understand how disease and treatment vary in a diverse population. Both CIRM and Fuji Film are committed to making even more improvements and additions to the collection in the future to ensure this is a vital resource for researchers for years to come.
There’s a lot of
fiction, a lot of misinformation surrounding stem cells and stem cell research.
There are claims that are not based on solid science and clinics that are
offering so-called “treatments” that are unproven, even dangerous for patients.
Now you have a chance to talk to the experts in the field and get solid answers
from them about what’s working, what’s not, and how you can find a therapy that
might be appropriate for you.
Do you have
questions about the latest in research using stem cells to help people
recovering from a stroke? We’ll have someone who can answer them.
Want to know if stem
cells can help people battling cancer? Or what’s happening in finding a stem
cell treatment for diabetes or sickle cell disease, even autism, Alzheimer’s or
Parkinson’s disease? We’ll have experts to answers those.
This is all
happening in a special Facebook Live “Ask the Stem Cell Team” event on Thursday,
December 12th from 10.30am to 11.30amPDT. To take part
all you have to do is tune in on the day and post a question or you can send us
one ahead of time at info@cirm.ca.gov
We will do our best
to answer as many of them as we can during the Facebook Live event, and those
we don’t have time to get to we’ll answer in a blog at a later date.
Way back in the 1990’s scientists were hard at work decoding the human genome, trying to map and understand all the genes that make up people. At the time there was a sense of hope, a feeling that once we had decoded the genome, we’d have cures for all sorts of things by next Thursday. It didn’t quite turn out that way.
The same was true
for stem cell research. In the early days there was a strong feeling that this
was going to quite quickly produce new treatments and cures for diseases
ranging from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to heart disease and stroke. Although
we have made tremendous strides we are still not where we hoped we’d be.
It’s a tough lesson
to learn, but an important one: good scientific research moves at its own pace
and pays little heed to our hopes or desires. It takes time, often a long time,
and money, usually a lot of money, to develop new treatments for deadly
diseases and disorders.
Many people, particularly those battling deadly diseases who are running out of time, are frustrated at the slow pace of stem cell research, at the years and years of work that it takes to get even the most promising therapy into a clinical trial where it can be tested in people. That’s understandable. If your life is on the line, it’s difficult to be told that you have to be patient. Time is a luxury many patients don’t have.
But that caution is
necessary. The last thing we want to do is rush to test something in people
that isn’t ready. And stem cells are a whole new way of treating disease, using
cells that may stay in the body for years, so we really need to be sure we have
done everything we can to ensure they are safe before delivering them to
people.
The field of gene
therapy was set back years after one young patient, Jesse Gelsinger,
died as a result of an early experimental treatment. We don’t want the same to
happen to stem cell research.
And yet progress is
being made, albeit not as quickly as any of us would like. At the end of the
first ten years of CIRM’s existence we had ten projects that we supported that
were either in, or applying to be in, a clinical trial sanctioned by the US
Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Five years later that number is 56.
Most of those are in
Phase 1 or 2 clinical trials which means they are still trying to show they are
both safe and effective enough to be made available to a wider group of people.
However, some of our projects are in Phase 3, the last step before, hopefully,
being given FDA approval to be made more widely available and – just as
important – to be covered by insurance.
Other CIRM-funded projects
have been given Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT)
designation by the FDA, a
new program that allows projects that show they are safe and benefit patients
in early stage clinical trials, to apply for priority review, meaning they
could get approved faster than normal. Out of 40 RMAT designations awarded so
far, six are for CIRM projects.
We are working hard
to live up to our mission statement of accelerating stem cell treatments to
patients with unmet medical needs. We have been fortunate in having $3 billion
to spend on advancing this research in California; an amount no other US state,
indeed few other countries, have been able to match. Yet even that amount is
tiny compared to the impact that many of these diseases have. For example, the
economic cost of treating diabetes in the US is a staggering $327 billion a
year.
The simple truth is
that unless we, as a nation, invest much more in scientific research, we are
not going to be able to develop cures and new, more effective, treatments for a
wide range of diseases.
Time and money are
always going to be challenging when it comes to advancing stem cell research
and bringing treatments to patients. With greater knowledge and understanding
of stem cells and how best to use them we can speed up the timeline. But
without money none of that can happen.
Our blog is just one of many covering the topic of “What are the hurdles impacting patient access to cell and gene therapies” as part of Signal’s fourth annual blog carnival.
Dr. Mathew Blurton-Jones, leader of team that developed the chimeric “Mighty Mouse” model at the University of California, Irvine
In ancient Greek mythology, a Chimera was a creature that was usually depicted as a lion with an additional goat head and a serpent for a tail. Due to the Chimera’s animal hybrid nature, the term “chimeric” came to fruition in the scientific community as a way to describe an organism containing two or more different sets of DNA.
A CIRM-funded study conducted by Dr. Mathew Blurton-Jones and his team at UC Irvine describes a way for human brain immune cells, known as microglia, to grow and function inside mice. Since the mice contain a both human cells and their own mice cells, they are described as being chimeric.
In order to develop this chimeric “mighty mouse” model, Dr. Blurton-Jones and his team generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which have the ability to turn into any kind of cell, from cell samples donated by adult patients. For this study, the researchers converted iPSCs into microglia, a type of immune cell found in the brain, and implanted them into genetically modified mice. After a few months, they found that the implanted cells successfully integrated inside the brains of the mice.
By finding a way to look at human microglia grow and function in real time in an animal model, scientists can further analyze crucial mechanisms contributing to neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, traumatic brain injury, and stroke.
For this particular study, Dr. Blurton-Jones and his team looked at human microglia in the mouse brain in relation to Alzheimer’s, which could hold clues to better understand and treat the disease. The team did this by introducing amyloid plaques, protein fragments in the brain that accumulate in people with Alzheimer’s, and evaluating how the human microglia responded. They found that the human microglia migrated toward the amyloid plaques and surrounding them, which is what is observed in Alzheimer’s patients.
In a press release, Dr. Blurton-Jones expressed the importance of studying microglia by stating that,
“Microglia are now seen as having a crucial role in the development and progression of Alzheimer’s. The functions of our cells are influenced by which genes are turned on or off. Recent research has identified over 40 different genes with links to Alzheimer’s and the majority of these are switched on in microglia. However, so far we’ve only been able to study human microglia at the end stage of Alzheimer’s in post-mortem tissues or in petri dishes.”
Furthermore, Dr. Blurton-Jones highlighted the importance of looking at human microglia in particular by saying that,
“The human microglia also showed significant genetic differences from the rodent version in their response to the plaques, demonstrating how important it is to study the human form of these cell.”
The full results of this study were published in Cell.
Speakers at the Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network Symposium: Photo by Marco Sanchez
From Day One CIRM’s goal has been to advance stem cell research in California. We don’t do that just by funding the most promising research -though the 51 clinical trials we have funded to date clearly shows we do that rather well – but also by trying to bring the best minds in the field together to overcome problems.
Over the years we
have held conferences, workshops and symposiums on everything from Parkinson’s
disease, cerebral
palsy and tissue
engineering. Each one attracted the key players and stakeholders in the
field, brainstorming ideas to get past obstacles and to explore new ways of
developing therapies. It’s an attempt to get scientists, who would normally be
rivals or competitors, to collaborate and partner together in finding the best
way forward.
It’s not easy to do,
and the results are not always obvious right away, but it is essential if we
hope to live up to our mission of accelerating stem cell therapies to patients
with unmet medical needs.
For example. This
past week we helped organize two big events and were participants in another.
The first event we
pulled together, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was a
workshop called “Brainstorm Neurodegeneration”. It brought together leaders in stem
cell research, genomics, big data, patient advocacy and the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) to tackle some of the issues that have hampered progress
in finding treatments for things like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS and
Huntington’s disease.
We rather
ambitiously subtitled the workshop “a cutting-edge meeting to disrupt the field”
and while the two days of discussions didn’t resolve all the problems facing us
it did produce some fascinating ideas and some tantalizing glimpses at ways to
advance the field.
Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network Symposium: Photo by Marco Sanchez
Two days later we partnered with UC San Francisco to host the Fourth Annual CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network Symposium. This brought together the scientists who develop therapies, the doctors and nurses who deliver them, and the patients who are in need of them. The theme was “The Past, Present & Future of Regenerative Medicine” and included both a look at the initial discoveries in gene therapy that led us to where we are now as well as a look to the future when cellular therapies, we believe, will become a routine option for patients.
Bringing these
different groups together is important for us. We feel each has a key role to
play in moving these projects and out of the lab and into clinical trials and
that it is only by working together that they can succeed in producing the
treatments and cures patients so desperately need.
Cierra Jackson: Photo by Marco Sanchez
As always it was the patients who surprised us. One, Cierra Danielle Jackson, talked about what it was like to be cured of her sickle cell disease. I think it’s fair to say that most in the audience expected Cierra to talk about her delight at no longer having the crippling and life-threatening condition. And she did. But she also talked about how hard it was adjusting to this new reality.
Cierra said sickle
cell disease had been a part of her life for all her life, it shaped her daily
life and her relationships with her family and many others. So, to suddenly
have that no longer be a part of her caused a kind of identity crisis. Who was
she now that she was no longer someone with sickle cell disease?
She talked about how
people with most diseases were normal before they got sick, and will be normal
after they are cured. But for people with sickle cell, being sick is all they
have known. That was their normal. And now they have to adjust to a new normal.
It was a powerful
reminder to everyone that in developing new treatments we have to consider the
whole person, their psychological and emotional sides as well as the physical.
CIRM’s Dr. Maria Millan (right) at a panel presentation at the Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium. Panel from left to right are: James Doroshow, NCI; Sandy Weill, former CEO Citigroup; Allan Jones, CEO Allen Institute
And so on to the third event we were part of, the Stanford Drug Discovery Symposium. This was a high level, invitation-only scientific meeting that included some heavy hitters – such as Nobel Prize winners Paul Berg and Randy Schekman, former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf. Over the course of two days they examined the role that philanthropy plays in advancing research, the increasingly important role of immunotherapy in battling diseases like cancer and how tools such as artificial intelligence and big data are shaping the future.
CIRM’s President and CEO, Dr. Maria Millan, was one of those invited to speak and she talked about how California’s investment in stem cell research is delivering Something Better than Hope – which by a happy coincidence is the title of our 2018 Annual Report. She highlighted some of the 51 clinical trials we have funded, and the lives that have been changed and saved by this research.
The presentations at
these conferences and workshops are important, but so too are the conversations
that happen outside the auditorium, over lunch or at coffee. Many great
collaborations have happened when scientists get a chance to share ideas, or
when researchers talk to patients about their ideas for a successful clinical
trial.
It’s amazing what happens when you bring people together who might otherwise never have met. The ideas they come up with can change the world.
