Board Meeting

CIRM welcomes new Chair, bids farewell to Art Torres and Jonathan Thomas

/ Esteban Cortez / 1 Comment

Dr. Vito Imbasciani was sworn in as the new Chair of the Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) at its March meeting.

Imbasciani (pictured above at left) was elected to the six-year term at CIRM’s January Board meeting. He will replace outgoing chair Jonathan Thomas, who has served in the position since 2011. 

“My experience has positioned me to champion the aims of CIRM, advocate for it cogently, and represent it responsibly before the public and their state and federal elected representatives,” Imbasciani said. “I look forward to the challenge of advancing the groundbreaking work of this Agency, at the same time nourishing the hopes for medical advances held by the citizens of our great State.”  

Imbasciani has served as the Secretary of the California Department of Veterans Affairs (CalVet) since 2015. As Secretary, he created several new programs within the department, including forging eight independent California veteran homes into a unified system, establishing programs for veterans in state prisons, and supporting the 58 county veteran service offices. 

Current CIRM Vice Chair Maria Bonneville, Fmr. Vice Chair Sen. Art Torres (ret). and Fmr. Chair Jonathan Thomas

CIRM also bid farewell to Sen. Art Torres (ret) and Jonathan Thomas (also known as JT) for their service on our Board.

JT was elected as Chair of the Board in 2011 after he was nominated by then-Governor Jerry Brown, Treasurer Bill Lockyer, and Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom.

He served as chair of the Governing Board for more than 12 years. In that time, he led CIRM in granting $2.5 billion in grants to support groundbreaking research and discovery to advance stem cell research and accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.

He led the agency as it expanded its work with industry, revamped its award processes, prepared for the expiration of bond funding, supported the drafting of Proposition 14, and planned for the next phase of CIRM’s programs after the voters approved $5.5 billion in additional funding.

Senator Torres was nominated in 2009 as CIRM Vice Chair by then-Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom and Treasurer Bill Lockyer, and shortly after was elected by the CIRM Governing Board.

Senator Torres served on the Grants and Standards working groups, and served as the inaugural Chair of the Accessibility and Affordability Working Group. He served on numerous subcommittees, led CIRM’s government relations efforts, and played a pivotal role in launching CIRM’s SPARK high school internship program.

CIRM Vice Chair Maria Bonneville, Fmr. Chair Jonathan Thomas, Chair Vito Imbasciani, and President & CEO Maria Millan

CIRM expresses its deepest gratitude to Senator Torres and JT for their service on its Governing Board and for their dedication to the advancement of stem cell research and our mission to accelerate world class science to deliver transformative regenerative medicine treatments in an equitable manner to a diverse California and world.

CIRM Board Appoints Dr. Maria Millan as President and CEO

/ Karen Ring / 1 Comment

Dr. Maria Millan, President and CEO of CIRM, at the September Board meeting. (Todd Dubnicoff, CIRM)

Yesterday was a big day for CIRM. Our governing Board convened for its September ICOC meeting and appointed Dr. Maria Millan as our new President and CEO. Dr. Millan has been serving as the Interim President/CEO since July, replacing former President Dr. Randal Mills.

Dr. Millan has been at CIRM since 2012 and was instrumental in the development of CIRM’s infrastructure programs including the Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network and the agency’s Strategic Plan, a five-year plan that lays out our agency’s goals through 2020. Previously, Dr. Millan was the Vice President of Therapeutics at CIRM, helping the agency fund 23 new clinical trials since the beginning of 2016.

The Board vote to appoint Dr. Millan as President and CEO was unanimous and enthusiastic. Chairman of the Board, Jonathan Thomas, shared the Board’s sentiments when he said,

“Dr. Millan is absolutely the right person for this position. Having seen Dr. Millan as the Interim CEO of CIRM for three months and how she has operated in that position, I am even more enthusiastic than I was before. I am grateful that we have someone of Maria’s caliber to lead our Agency.”

Dr. Millan has pursued a career devoted to helping patients. Before working at CIRM, she was an organ transplant surgeon and researcher and served as an Associate Professor of Surgery and Director of the Pediatric Organ Transplant Program at Stanford University. Dr. Millan was also the Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at StemCells, Inc.

In her permanent role as President, Dr. Millan is determined to keep CIRM on track to achieve the goals outlined in our strategic plan and to achieve its mission to accelerate treatments to patients with unmet needs. She commented in a CIRM press release,

“I joined the CIRM team because I wanted to make a difference in the lives of patients. They are the reason why CIRM exists and why we fund stem cell research. I am humbled and very honored to be CIRM’s President and look forward to further implementing our agency’s Strategic Plan in the coming years.”

The Board also voted to fund two new Alpha Stem Cell Clinics at UC Davis and UC San Francisco and five new clinical trials. Three of the clinical awards went to projects targeting cancer.

The City of Hope received $12.8 million to fund a Phase 1 trial targeting malignant gliomas (an aggressive brain cancer) using CAR-T cell therapy. Forty Seven Inc. received $5 million for a Phase 1b clinical trial treating acute myeloid leukemia. And Nohla Therapeutics received $6.9 million for a Phase 2 trial testing a hematopoietic stem cell and progenitor cell therapy to help patients suffering from neutropenia, a condition that leaves people susceptible to deadly infections, after receiving chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia.

The other two trials target diabetes and end stage kidney failure. ViaCyte, Inc. was awarded $20 million to fund a Phase 1/2 clinical trial to test its PEC-Direct islet cell replacement therapy for high-risk type 1 diabetes. Humacyte Inc. received $14.1 million to fund a Phase 3 trial that is comparing the performance of its acellular bioengineered vessel with the current standard of dialysis treatment for kidney disease patients.

The Board also awarded $5.2 million to Stanford Medicine for a late stage preclinical project that will use CRISPR gene editing technology to correct the sickle cell disease mutation in blood-forming stem cells to treat patients with sickle cell disease. This award was particularly well timed as September is Sickle Cell Awareness month.

The Stanford team, led by Dr. Matthew Porteus, hopes to complete the final experiments required for them to file an Investigational New Drug (IND) application with the FDA so they can be approved to start a clinical trial hopefully sometime in 2018. You can read more about Dr. Porteus’ work here and you can read our past blogs featuring Sickle Cell Awareness here and here.

With the Board’s vote yesterday, CIRM’s clinical trial count rises to 40 funded trials since its inception. 23 of these trials were funded after the launch of our Strategic Plan bringing us close to the half way point of funding 50 new clinical trials by 2020. With more “shots-on-goal” CIRM hopes to increase the chances that one of these trials will lead to an FDA-approved therapy for patients.

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Partnering with the best to help find cures for rare diseases

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

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

/ Karen Ring / 5 Comments

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

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

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

Our Progress

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

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

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

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

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

Our Future

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

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

CIRM CEO and President, Randy Mills.

Randy Mills

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

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One man’s story points to hope against a deadly skin cancer

/ Kevin McCormack / 3 Comments

One of the great privileges and pleasures of working at the stem cell agency is the chance to meet and work with some remarkable people, such as my colleagues here at CIRM and the researchers we support. But for me the most humbling, and by far the most rewarding experience, is having a chance to get to know the people we work for, the patients and patient advocates.

Norm Beegun, got stem cell therapy for metastatic melanoma

Norm Beegun, got stem cell therapy for metastatic melanoma

At our May Board meeting I got to meet a gentleman who exemplifies everything that I truly admire about the patients and patient advocates. His name is Norm Beegun. And this is his story.

Norm lives in Los Angeles. In 2002 he went to see his regular doctor, an old high school friend, who suggested that since it had been almost ten years since he’d had a chest x-ray it might be a good idea to get one. At first Norm was reluctant. He felt fine, was having no health problems and didn’t see the need. But his friend persisted and so Norm agreed. It was a decision that changed, and ultimately saved, his life.

The x-ray showed a spot on his lung. More tests were done. They confirmed it was cancer; stage IV melanoma. They did a range of other examinations to see if they could spot any signs of the cancer on his skin, any potential warnings signs that they had missed. They found nothing.

Norm underwent surgery to remove the tumor. He also tried several other approaches to destroy the cancer. None of them worked; each time the cancer returned; each time to a different location.

Then a nurse who was working with him on these treatments suggested he see someone named Dr. Robert Dillman, who was working on a new approach to treating metastatic melanoma, one involving cancer stem cells.

Norm got in touch with Dr. Dillman and learned what the treatment involved; he was intrigued and signed up. They took some cells from Norm’s tumor and processed them, turning them into a vaccine, a kind of personalized therapy that would hopefully work with Norm’s own immune system to destroy the cancer.

That was in 2004. Once a month for the next six months he was given injections of the vaccine. Unlike the other therapies he had tried this one had no side effects, no discomfort, no pain or problems. All it did was get rid of the cancer. Regular scans since then have shown no sign that the melanoma has returned. Theoretically that could be because the new therapy destroyed the standard tumor cells as well as the cancer stem cells that lead to recurrence.

Norm says when you are diagnosed with an incurable life-threatening disease, one with a 5-year survival rate of only around 15%, you will try anything; so he said it wasn’t a hard decision to take part in the clinical trial, he felt he had nothing to lose.

“I didn’t know if it would help me. I didn’t think I’d be cured. But I wanted to be a guinea pig and perhaps help others.”

When he was diagnosed his son had just won a scholarship to play football at the University of California, Berkeley. Norm says he feared he would never be able to see his son play. But thanks to cleverly scheduling surgery during the off-season and having a stem cell therapy that worked he not only saw his son play, he never missed a game.

Norm returned to Berkeley on May 21st, 2015. He came to address the CIRM Board in support of an application by a company called NeoStem (which has just changed its name to Caladrius Biosciences). This was the company that had developed the cell therapy for metastatic melanoma that Norm took.

“Talking about this is still very emotional. When I got up to talk to the CIRM Board about this therapy, and ask them to support it, I wanted to let them know my story, the story of someone who had their life saved by this treatment. Because of this I am here today. Because of this I was able to see my son play. But just talking about it left me close to tears.”

It left many others in the room close to tears as well. The CIRM Board voted to fund the NeoStem application, investing $17.7 million to help the company carry out a Phase 3 clinical trial, the last hurdle it needs to clear to prove to the Food and Drug Administration that this should be approved for use in metastatic melanoma.

Norm says he is so grateful for the extra years he has had, and he is always willing to try and support others going through what he did:

“I counsel other people diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. I feel that I want to help others, to give them a sense of hope. It is such a wonderful feeling, being able to show other people that you can survive this disease.”

When you get to meet people like Norm, how could you not love this job.

Faster, better, more efficient. Challenging? That too. An update on CIRM 2.0.

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Changing direction is never easy. The greater the change the greater the likelihood you’ll have to make adjustments and do some fine-tuning along the way to make sure you get it right.

On January 1st of this year we made a big change, launching CIRM 2.0. Our President and CEO Dr. C. Randal Mills called it “a radical overhaul of the way the Agency does business.” This new approach puts the emphasis on patients, partnerships and speed and cuts down the time from application to funding of clinical-stage projects from around two years to just 120 days.

You can read more about 2.0 here.

So, several months into the program how are we doing?

Clinical stage of CIRM 2.0 has three programs

Clinical stage of CIRM 2.0 has three programs

Well, since January 1st we have had three application tracks under 2.0 that reflect our goal of accelerating therapies to patients with unmet medical needs. These focus on late stage work to either get a promising therapy into a clinical trial, to carry out a clinical trial, or to help a promising project move even faster.

Under those three programs we have had 12 applications for funding, for a total request of $111 million. With application deadlines the last business day of each month two of those were in January, two in February, three more in March and five in April.

As Dr. Mills told our governing Board when they met last week, that number is more than we were expecting:

 “When we started the program we calculated there’d be around one or two applications a month, not five. I don’t think having five applications a month is sustainable, but that’s probably just the backlog, the pent up demand for funding, working its way through the system. For now we can cope with that volume.”

Interestingly eight of those applications were for funding for clinical trials:

  • Two for Phase 1
  • One for Phase 2
  • Five for Phase 3

Last week our Board approved one of those Phase 3 trials (the last big hurdle to clear before the Food and Drug Administration will consider approving it for wider use), investing almost $18 million in NeoStem’s therapy for one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer, metastatic melanoma.

This is the first time we have ever funded a Phase 3 trial. So, quite a milestone for us. But it may well not be the last one. The Board also approved a project to conduct the late preclinical work needed to apply to conduct a trial in retinitis pigmentosa.

Dr. Mills said there are two clear patterns so far:

“We are getting a more mature portfolio of clinical stage programs for adjudication. We are also starting to see requests for accelerating activities, where we have made previous awards to researchers who now have identified new ways to accelerate that work and they are turning to us for help in doing that.”

Of the 12 applications received we have screened all of them within the 7-day target window to make sure they meet funding criteria. Some have been ruled out for not being within the scope of the award program. The accepted applications have all had budget reviews and been sent on for expert analysis within the slated time frames.

We had a couple of hiccups with our first review but that resulted from on-line technology and getting everyone comfortable with the new rules we were bringing in. The second review resulted in the first two awards by our Board last week, and the third review occurred yesterday.

“The bottom line is things are moving through and things are being weeded out. In March we had two clinical stage applications and one add-on funding application but that one add-on failed in screening. So, in general CIRM 2.0 is being well utilized. There’s no question we are significantly reducing application time from application to funding, attracting later stage applications. Clearly this has not been without its challenges but the team is doing a great job of managing everything.”

And remember this is only the first part of CIRM 2.0. We have two other programs, for Discovery or basic research and Translational research, that are being developed and we plan on rolling those out later this summer.

Stay tuned for more details on those programs.

Getting the right tools for the right job

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Imagine a device that sits outside the body and works like a form of dialysis for a damaged liver, filtering out the toxins and giving the liver a chance to regenerate, and the patient a chance to avoid the need for a transplant.

Or imagine a method of enhancing the number of stem cells we can harvest or generate from umbilical cord blood, enabling us to use those stem cells and offer life-saving bone marrow transplants to all the patients who don’t have a matched donor.

Well, you may not have to imagine for too long. Yesterday, our governing Board approved almost $30 million in funding for our Tools and Technology Awards and two of the successful applications are for researchers hoping to turn those two ideas into reality.

The Tools n Tech awards may not have the glamor or cache of the big money awards that are developing treatments heading towards clinical trials, but they are nonetheless an essential part of what we do.

As our Board Chair Jonathan Thomas said in a news release they focus on developing new approaches or creating new ways of overcoming some of the biggest obstacles in stem cell research.

“Sometimes even the most promising therapy can be derailed by a tiny problem. These awards are designed to help find ways to overcome those problems, to bridge the gaps in our knowledge and ensure that the best research is able to keep progressing and move out of the lab and into clinical trials in patients.”

Altogether 20 awards were funded for a wide variety of different ideas and projects. Some focus on improving our ability to manufacture the kinds of cells we need for transplanting into patients. Another one plans to use a new class of genetic engineering tools to re-engineer the kind of stem cells found in bone marrow, making them resistant to HIV/AIDS. They also hope this method could ultimately be used to directly target the stem cells while they are inside the body, rather than taking the cells out and performing the same procedure in a lab and later transplanting them back.

Dr. Kent Leach, UC Davis School of Engineering

Dr. Kent Leach, UC Davis School of Engineering

One of the winners was Dr. Kent Leach from the University of California, Davis School of Engineering. He’s looking to make a new kind of imaging probe, one that uses light and sound to measure the strength and durability of bone and cartilage created by stem cells. This could eliminate the need for biopsies to make the same measurements, which is good news for patients and might also help reduce healthcare costs.

We featured Dr. Leach in one of our Spotlight videos where he talks about using stem cells to help repair broken bones that no longer respond to traditional methods.

Spiderman Sets the Tone for Stem Cell Agency Board Meeting

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I don’t often think about Spiderman at meetings of our governing Board – no, really I don’t – but yesterday was an exception. Not that I was daydreaming, rather I was listening to our new President & CEO C. Randal Mills, Ph.D., talk about his determination to set a very specific tone in leading the agency.

shutterstock_109433912

Randy had just explained to the Board that he had asked the agency’s General Counsel to draw up an agreement stating he – Randy, not the lawyer – will not accept a job with any company funded by CIRM for at least one year following his departure from the agency. In addition he will also refuse to accept gifts or travel payments from any company, institution or individual who receives agency funding.

In a news release we issued following the Board meeting he explained his reasons for making this commitment:

“I want the people of California to know that my sole interest in being at CIRM is to help advance stem cell treatments to patients who are in need. I will do so with a full commitment to transparency and by never compromising the integrity of our mission nor our trust to the taxpayers of California.”

And that’s where Spiderman comes in. As any fan of the movie or comic books can tell you one of the things Spiderman says a lot is “With great power comes great responsibility.”

In making his commitment Randy wanted to send a very clear and very strong message that he understands what his role as the President involves, and that it’s important for him to demonstrate that through his actions.

Board member and patient advocate, Sherry Lansing, echoed that saying:

“We take even the possibility of a perception of a conflict of interest very seriously and are determined to do whatever is necessary to ensure that we protect the reputation of the agency and the work that we do. We fully support Dr. Mills in the way he is handling this issue.”

Randy decided to make that commitment after his predecessor, Dr. Alan Trounson joined the Board of Stem Cells Inc., a company that we awarded more than $19 million to develop a therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. While there is nothing illegal about Dr. Trounson’s actions the news did cause a bit of a stir with a few commentators saying this was a dark mark against the agency – even though there is nothing we could have done to stop it because we did not know it was happening.

Randy is not asking anyone else to make the same commitment he has made, but he says it was important for him to do so. His role as President & CEO carries great responsibility and he says he wants to show that he takes it very seriously and will lead by example.

I rather think Spiderman would approve.

Kevin McCormack

A Second Chance for a Spinal Cord Injury Trial, and a Powerful Reminder from Patient Advocates

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Yesterday’s meeting of our governing Board was important for a number of reasons. First, the Board voted to invest some $32 million to try and get two promising projects into clinical trials – more on that in a minute – and also to try and attract some world-class researchers to California through our Research Leadership awards. It was also the first Board meeting for our new President, C. Randal Mills, Ph.D.

However, for me one of the most important parts of it was that it offered patient advocates a chance to come and talk to the Board directly, to share with them their hopes for stem cell research, and their needs in battling disabling conditions.

Yesterday a mother, Silvia Michelazzi, who suffered preeclampsia during her pregnancy and almost lost her child talked about the need for research to find better ways of preventing this deadly condition. Silvia’s daughter was born at 29 weeks and spent the first couple of months of life in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit.

One of the researchers we are funding, Dr. Mana Parast of UC San Diego, is doing some fascinating work in using iPS cells to better understand how preeclampsia works, and hopefully to find better ways of preventing it or treating it when it’s detected. We’ll be posting video of both talks in the next few weeks.

Earlier a group of individuals who have Parkinson’s disease talked to the Board about what it is like to live with that disease, to slowly lose control over their bodies and know that it was only going to get worse. They made a strong plea for more funding for stem cell research into this area.

To hear people like this speak is a powerful reminder of why we do this work; it puts a human face on the need for more research into so many areas, and why we need to do all that we can to accelerate that research, to find new treatments and cures.

Too often patients are left out of the discussion when it comes to funding research. At the stem cell agency we invite them into the room and welcome hearing from them. It’s not always easy to listen to what they have to say, particularly as we know some research is at an early stage of development and we won’t always be able to do what they want us to. But those voices are an important part of what this agency is all about. We were created by the people of California, so it’s important that the people feel they can come and talk to us any time they want.

From a business perspective yesterday’s meeting was very productive. The Board voted to invest $14.3 million in Asterias Biotherapeutics to move a stem cell therapy for spinal cord injury into clinical trials. This is the second time this approach will have been tried. The first was with Geron in 2010 and that trial, even though it ended earlier than expected because of financial reasons, showed the approach appears to be safe. Asterias is going to take it to the next level.

The other big award was $5.6 million to John Zaia at the City of Hope near Los Angeles to move his work in finding a treatment for HIV/AIDS into clinical trials.

Both are part of our Strategic Partnership program that requires them to provide matching funds for this work.

You can read all about those awards and the Research Leadership ones too in a news release we issued after the meeting.

kevin mccormack