C. Randal MIlls

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

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
RandyFarewellFamily

Randy Mills and his family

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

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

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

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

But perhaps the most moving tributes came from patients advocates.

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

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

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

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

Randy praised Maria for her intelligence, compassion and vision:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Mills, Randy Union Tribune K.C. Alfred

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Maria Millan

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

 

 

 

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

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

hitting-machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Translating Center will:

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

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

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

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

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

 

Accelerating the drive for new stem cell treatments

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Acceleration

Acceleration is defined as the “increase in the rate or speed of something.” For us that “something” is new stem cell treatments for patients with unmet medical needs. Today our governing Board just approved a $15 million partnership with Quintiles to help us achieve that acceleration.

Quintiles was awarded the funding to create a new Accelerating Center. The goal of the center is to give stem cell researchers the support they need to help make their clinical trials successful.

As our President and CEO Randy Mills said in a news release:

randy-at-podium1CIRM President Randy Mills addresses the CIRM Board

“Many scientists are brilliant researchers but have little experience or expertise in running a clinical trial; this Accelerating Center means they don’t have to develop those skills; we provide them for them. This partnership with Quintiles means that scientists don’t have to learn how to manage patient enrollment or how to create a data base to manage the results. Instead they are free to focus on what they do best, namely science.”

How does it work? Well, if a researcher has a promising therapy and approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start a clinical trial, the Accelerating Center helps them get that trial off the ground. It helps them find the patients they need, get those patients consented and ready for the trial, and then helps manage the trial and the data from the trial.

The devil is in the details

Managing those details can be a key factor in determining whether a clinical trial is going to be successful. Last year, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine listed the main reasons why clinical trials fail.

Among the reasons are:

  • Poor study design: Selecting the wrong patients, the wrong dosing and the wrong endpoint, as well as bad data and bad site management cause severe problems.
  • Poor management: A project manager who does not have enough experience in costing and conducting clinical trials will lead to weak planning, with no clear and real timelines, and to ultimate failure.

We hope our partnership with Quintiles in this Accelerating Center will help researchers avoid those and the other pitfalls. As the world’s largest provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services, Quintiles has a lot of experience and expertise in this area. On its Twitter page it’s slogan is “Better, smarter, faster trials” so I think we made a smart choice.

When Randy Mills first pitched this idea to the Board, he said that he is a great believer in “not asking fish to learn how to fly, they should just do what they do best”.

The Accelerating Center means scientists can do what they do best, and we hope that leads to what patients need most; treatments and cures.

Related Links:

Why is a cell therapy that restores sight to the blind against the law?

/ Kevin McCormack / 5 Comments

FDA

A lot of people are frustrated with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its woefully slow process for approving stem cell therapies. That’s one of the reasons why we started the CIRM Stem Cell Champions campaign, to gather as many like-minded supporters of stem cell research as possible and help to change the way the FDA works, to create a more efficient approval process.

You can read more about that campaign and watch a short video on what being a Stem Cell Champion involves (hint: not very much).

Now Randy Mills, our President and CEO, has teamed up with former US Senator Bill Frist to explain precisely why the FDA needs to change the way it regulates stem cells, and to offer a simple way to create the system that will best serve the needs of patients.

This Op Ed appeared on Fox News’ online Opinion section on Friday, May 20th.

Cell therapy reversed blindness for 47,000 patients in 2015. So why is it against the law?

By C. Randal Mills Ph.D., Sen. Bill Frist M.D.

As medical miracles go, restoring sight to the blind is right up there. A mother seeing her baby for the first time, or a child being able to count the stars is a beautiful gift, and its value cannot be overstated. Last year 47,000 Americans received that gift and had their blindness reversed through the transplantation of cells from a corneal donor’s final selfless act.

It is safe, it is effective, and because it is curative, it is a relatively cost effective procedure. It is medicine at its most beautiful. And according to FDA regulations, the distribution of this cell therapy is in violation of federal law.

That’s right. The regulation says that no matter how competent the surgeon, the FDA must first approve cells from donated corneas as if they were a drug—a process that takes over a decade and can costs billions of dollars — all for a practice that has been successfully restoring sight for more than 50 years. And this is only one example.

The good news: the FDA doesn’t always adhere to its regulations and has not in this case.

The bad news: inconsistent enforcement creates uncertainty, deterring innovation for other unmet medical needs such as arthritis, back pain, and diabetic ulcers.

How did a country known for pioneering medical breakthroughs get here?

Appropriate regulation of living cells that treat disease is inherently complex. Some therapies, like corneal cell transplants, are well-understood. Others are far more sophisticated and can involve forcing cells to change from one type to another, cutting out defective genes, and growing cells in culture to expand their numbers into the billions. Although this may sound like science fiction, it’s the type of very real science that will revolutionize the practice of medicine. And it is a challenging spectrum to regulate.

Unfortunately, what we have today amounts to a regulatory light switch for cell therapy; one that is either OFF or ON. For some cell therapies there is essentially no pre-market regulation. But at some point of added complexity, often arbitrarily decided by the FDA, the switch flips to ON and the cell becomes a drug in the minds of the Agency. And the consequences could not be more profound.

A product can be introduced through the OFF pathway in days with no FDA review and at very little cost. The ON pathway on the other hand, takes 10-20 years and can cost over a billion dollars. For cell therapy, there is no in between.

It is not possible to regulate the continuum of cell therapies fairly and effectively by using this binary approach. The system is broken and is impeding the hunt for safe and effective treatments for suffering patients.

Why? Because sensible people don’t invest significant capital gambling that the FDA will give them a pass out of its rules. They evaluate the time and cost of development assuming they will be forced down the ON pathway. They also assume that this arbitrary approach to regulation will (and often does) work against them by allowing a competitor to enter the market through the OFF pathway, placing them at a prohibitive disadvantage. The results speak for themselves. After 15 years under this paradigm we have had only a few cell therapies approved, all commercial disasters.

This is because the ON-OFF approach fails to adequately account for the difference in cell therapy complexity. To better understand, imagine this methodology applied to the regulation of automobiles. The government might permit low tech cars, say the Model T, to be sold without pre-market regulation. But if a manufacturer wanted to improve the vehicle by adding air conditioning, a radio or other such feature, the car would be subject to massive pre-market regulation. And not just on the new feature. Instead, the addition of the new feature would trigger a bumper-to-bumper evaluation of the entire car, increasing its development cost from basically nothing to that of a Lamborghini. The result would be streets full of hot, radio-less go-karts, except for a few ultra-high-end sports cars whose manufacturers are now defunct because they were never able to recoup the disproportionate costs of satisfying the regulatory system. This is what we see with cell therapies today: progress that is sluggish at best.

How can we move forward?

Ironically, the FDA identified a solution to the problem. In order to account for the broad spectrum inherent to cell therapy, in the late 90’s the FDA proposed a progressive, risk-based approach. The higher the risk, the greater the regulation. This guards against under regulation that might put patients at risk and prevents overregulation that can disincentivize the development of new or improved products.

In the FDA’s own words, the regulation they proposed would abide by a few basic principles:

  • “Under this tiered, risk-based approach, we propose to exert only the type of government regulation necessary to protect the public health.”
  • “The regulation of different types of human cells… will be commensurate with the public health risks…”
  • “These planned improvements will increase the safety of human cells… while encouraging the development of new products.”

It was a remarkably common sense approach that would have balanced safety with the need for innovation over an exceptionally broad range of technological complexity and risk.

It would have.

Unfortunately, the regulatory framework that was promised was never delivered, and it is time to resuscitate it. The burden placed on the development of cell therapies must accurately reflect the risks; must be balanced against the very real consequences of doing nothing (patients continuing to suffer); and must be consistently and fairly applied. In short, the FDA had it right and we need to give them the tools to deliver the regulatory paradigm they originally envisioned.

If we fix this highly fixable problem, we can create a system that will drive new innovations and better outcomes. Europe and Japan have already acted and are seeing the benefits. People with great ideas are coming off the bench, and game changing therapies are entering practice. While challenging the status quo does not sit well with some, particularly those who stand to prosper from the built-in barriers to entry the current structure provides, in the United States we have a responsibility to do better for patients and fix this broken system.

Randal Mills, Ph.D., is the President and CEO of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

William “Bill” H. Frist, M.D. is a nationally-acclaimed heart and lung transplant surgeon, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, and chairman of the Executive Board of the health service private equity firm Cressey & Company.

What’s the big idea? Or in this case, what’s the 19 big ideas?

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

supermarket magazineHave you ever stood in line in a supermarket checkout line and browsed through the magazines stacked conveniently at eye level? (of course you have, we all have). They are always filled with attention-grabbing headlines like “5 Ways to a Slimmer You by Christmas” or “Ten Tips for Rock Hard Abs” (that one doesn’t work by the way).

So with those headlines in mind I was tempted to headline our latest Board meeting as: “19 Big Stem Cell Ideas That Could Change Your Life!”. And in truth, some of them might.

The Board voted to invest more than $4 million in funding for 19 big ideas as part of CIRM’s Discovery Inception program. The goal of Inception is to provide seed funding for great, early-stage ideas that may impact the field of human stem cell research but need a little support to test if they work. If they do work out, the money will also enable the researchers to gather the data they’ll need to apply for larger funding opportunities, from CIRM and other institutions, in the future

The applicants were told they didn’t have to have any data to support their belief that the idea would work, but they did have to have a strong scientific rational for why it might

As our President and CEO Randy Mills said in a news release, this is a program that encourages innovative ideas.

Randy Mills, Stem Cell Agency President & CEO

Randy Mills, CIRM President & CEO

“This is a program supporting early stage ideas that have the potential to be ground breaking. We asked scientists to pitch us their best new ideas, things they want to test but that are hard to get funding for. We know not all of these will pan out, but those that do succeed have the potential to advance our understanding of stem cells and hopefully lead to treatments in the future.”

So what are some of these “big” ideas? (Here’s where you can find the full list of those approved for funding and descriptions of what they involve). But here are some highlights.

Alysson Muotri at UC San Diego has identified some anti-retroviral drugs – already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – that could help stop inflammation in the brain. This kind of inflammation is an important component in several diseases such as Alzheimer’s, autism, Parkinson’s, Lupus and Multiple Sclerosis. Alysson wants to find out why and how these drugs helps reduce inflammation and how it works. If he is successful it is possible that patients suffering from brain inflammation could immediately benefit from some already available anti-retroviral drugs.

Stanley Carmichael at UC Los Angeles wants to use induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – these are adult cells that have been genetically re-programmed so they are capable of becoming any cell in the body – to see if they can help repair the damage caused by a stroke. With stroke the leading cause of adult disability in the US, there is clearly a big need for this kind of big idea.

Holger Willenbring at UC San Francisco wants to use stem cells to create a kind of mini liver, one that can help patients whose own liver is being destroyed by disease. The mini livers could, theoretically, help stabilize a person’s own liver function until a transplant donor becomes available or even help them avoid the need for liver transplantation in the first place. Considering that every year, one in five patients on the US transplant waiting list will die or become too sick for transplantation, this kind of research could have enormous life-saving implications.

We know not all of these ideas will work out. But all of them will help deepen our understanding of how stem cells work and what they can, and can’t, do. Even the best ideas start out small. Our funding gives them a chance to become something truly big.

Related Links:

New stem cell approach targeting deadly blood cancers

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

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Every four minutes someone in the US is diagnosed with a blood cancer. It might be lymphoma or leukemia, myeloma or myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). While we have made great strides in treating some of these over the years, we still have a long way to go. Need proof? Well, every nine minutes someone in the US dies from a blood cancer.

Because of that need, the CIRM Board last week approved $3.5 million to help fund the search for a more effective, more efficient way to treat people suffering from blood cancer.

The Board funded a program by Angiocrine Biosciences, a San Diego-based company that is developing a new method for transplanting cord blood into patients.

Now cord blood transplants have been around for decades and they can be very effective. But they can also cause serious, even life-threatening complications. And they have limitations. For example some cord blood units are small and don’t have as many stem cells as the doctors would like. As a result, patients may need to spend longer in the hospital recovering from the procedure, putting them at increased risk of viral infections or pneumonia. Alternatively, doctors could use more than one cord blood unit for each transplant and while that seems to be an effective alternative, some studies suggest it can also carry an increased risk for serious complications such as Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) where the newly transplanted cells attack the patient’s body.

To get around these issues, Angiocrine is developing a product called AB-110. This takes stem cells from cord blood, uses a specialized manufacturing facility to expand their numbers and then mixes them with genetically modified endothelial cells, the kind of cell that forms the lining of blood vessels.

It’s hoped that AB-110 will reduce the complications and increase the chances the transplanted cells will successfully engraft, meaning they start growing and creating new, healthy, blood cells.

In a news release CIRM’s President and CEO, C. Randal Mills, PhD, says this program fits in perfectly with our mission of accelerating stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs:

“This project aims to do precisely that, speeding up the body’s ability to create new white blood cells and platelets – both essential qualities when treating deadly diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. Under CIRM 2.0, we are trying to create a pipeline of products that move out of the lab and into clinical trials in people, and we’re hopeful this program will demonstrate it’s potential and get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin a clinical trial.”

Everyone at Angiocrine and CIRM will work as hard as we can to move this research toward a clinical trial as fast as we can. But in the meantime there are tens of thousands of critically ill people in desperate need of a life-saving transplant.

One way of helping those in need is for new parents to donate their child’s umbilical cord blood to the state’s umbilical cord blood collection program. This is a safe procedure that doesn’t harm the baby but could save someone’s life.

The cord blood program is housed at the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures – a facility CIRM helped build and where we fund many great projects. This program is particularly important because it collects and stores cord blood units that reflect the state’s diverse communities, and that are available to all those in need of a transplant.

The bank also is a rich source of cord blood units for research, particularly for stem cell research, which will hopefully lead to even more effective therapies in the future.

If you want to accelerate stem cell therapies then create an Accelerating Center

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
Buckle up

Buckle up, we’re about to Accelerate

“You can’t teach fish to fly,” is one of the phrases that our CIRM President & CEO, Randy Mills, likes to throw out when asked why we needed to create new centers to help researchers move their most promising therapies out of the lab and into clinical trials.

His point is that many researchers are terrific at research but not so great at the form filling and other process-oriented skills needed to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a clinical trial.

So instead of asking them to learn how to do all those things, why don’t we, CIRM, create a system that will do it for them? And that’s where we came up with the idea for the Accelerating Center (we’re also creating a Translating Center – that’s a topic for a future blog but if you can’t wait to find out the juicy details you can find them here.)

The Accelerating Center will be a clinical research organization that provides regulatory, operational and other support services to researchers and companies hoping to get their stem cell therapies into a clinical trial. The goal is to match the scientific skills of researchers with the regulatory and procedural skills of the Accelerating Center to move these projects through the review process as quickly as possible.

But it doesn’t end there. Once a project has been given the green light by the FDA, the Accelerating Center will help with actually setting up and running their clinical trial, and helping them with data management to ensure they get high quality data from the trial. Again these skills are essential to run a good clinical trial but things researchers may not have learned about when getting a PhD.

We just issued what we call an RFA (Request for Applications)  for people interested in partnering with us to help create the Accelerating Center. To kick-start the process we are awarding up to $15 million for five years to create the Center, which will be based in California.

To begin with, the Accelerating Center will focus on supporting CIRM-funded stem cell projects. But the goal is to eventually extend that support to other stem cell programs.

Now, to be honest, there’s an element of self-interest in all this. We have a goal under our new Strategic Plan of funding 50 new clinical trials over the next five years. Right now, getting a stem cell-related project approved is a slow and challenging process. We think the Accelerating Center is one tool to help us change that and give the most promising projects the support they need to get out of the lab and into people.

There’s a lot more we want to do to help speed up the approval process as well, including working with the FDA to create a new, streamlined regulatory process, one that is faster and easier to navigate. But that may take some time. So in the meantime, the Accelerating Center will help “fish” to do what they do best, swim, and we’ll take care of the flying for them.

 

 

 

Board gives stem cell institute marching orders, and a road map

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

The poet T. S. Eliot once wrote: “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” Well, everyone at CIRM, California’s stem cell institute, is about to find out how tall we are.

Strategic Plan coverYesterday our governing Board approved a new Strategic Plan. To call it ambitious might be considered an understatement. Among the goals it commits us to achieving are:

  • Funding 50 new clinical trials in 5 years including 10 for rare or orphan disorders and 5 in conditions affecting children
  • Fostering enactment of a new, more efficient federal regulatory approval process for stem cell treatments
  • Introducing 50 new therapeutic candidates or devices into the development pipeline
  • Reducing the time it takes to move a stem cell treatment from the earliest Discovery stage into a clinical trial by 50%
  • Increasing the number of projects moving to the next stage of development by 50%

No easy task

Each goal by itself might be considered challenging. Taken together they are likely to stretch us all. And yet that’s why we joined CIRM, why we feel fortunate to be part of this mission. We have a chance to be part of a movement that could change the face of medicine as we know it. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. But now we know what we have to do to help achieve that.

As Randy Mills, our President and CEO, said in a news release, the goal in developing this Strategic Plan was to create a clear vision for the next five years of the Institute:

”We have around $900 million left to work with and we wanted a plan that used that money to the best possible effect, maximizing our chances of pushing as many new treatments to patients as possible. We didn’t want something ‘good enough’, we wanted something ‘great’. This plan is extremely ambitious, but also realistic in the goals it sets out and the way those goals can be met.”

The Strategic Plan – you can read it in full here – doesn’t just lay out goals, it also creates a road map on how to meet those goals. They include engaging industry more, being more creative in how we move the most promising projects from one stage of research to the next, and finding ways to change the regulatory approval process to help remove obstacles and speed up the progress of these therapies into clinical trials.

Aiming high

We know we may not achieve all our goals. As Randy Mills said at our Board meeting: “This is a difficult plan. These goals are not easy to achieve.” There are always risks in pursuing something so big and ambitious but no one ever achieved anything truly worthwhile by playing it safe. We are not interested in playing it safe.

We may start out by being, as T. S. Eliot put it “in over our heads”. But we’re confident we’ll be able to grow tall enough to make this plan work.

As Randy Mills told the Board: “If we are all in this together then the probability of success is high, and if we are successful then all this would have been worthwhile.”

Doing nothing is not OK: A call for change at the FDA

/ Kevin McCormack / 4 Comments

FDA-NotApprovedStampThe US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is caught between a rock and a hard place. And CIRM is going to try and help them get out from under that.

As things stand today, if the FDA approves a therapy quickly and a patient later dies from it, then they are widely criticized. If they take a long time to approve a therapy and people die waiting for that treatment, then they are just as widely criticized.

So maybe it’s time to help them change that, by creating a new pathway that allows for a faster, more efficient, but equally safe, process of approving stem cell therapies.

This was a topic that CIRM’s President and CEO, Dr. Randy Mills, took on at last week’s World Stem Cell Summit. He highlighted our mission – accelerating stem cell therapies to patients with unmet medical needs – as the driving force behind everything we do, including regulatory reform:

“We have had the current FDA regulatory structure for cell therapy in place for 15 years, and in that 15 years not one stem cell therapy has been approved. The scoreboard is not lying, there’s a zero on it. Not one therapy has been approved. There is an issue here, we can’t ignore that fact and so we made it part of our proposed new Strategic Plan to try and remove this burden.

“There is an excessively long translational pathway to get an Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the FDA (a necessary step to proceed with testing a therapy in a clinical trial). For non-cell therapies it takes 3-4 years to get an IND. For cell therapies it takes 6-8 years, twice as long.”

Mills says many potential therapies have been abandoned, or even stopped before they even got started, simply because the regulatory hurdles are so many and the costs so high.

“We are not anti-regulation, we are not anti-FDA, and we are not calling for the removal of rules and regulations around stem cell therapies, that would be bad for patients and research. These therapies have risks and we are not proposing any strategy that puts things on the market without any testing or safety data. But right now we are being so careful about safety to ensure patients are not put at risk while those same patients are dying from their disease.”

Chaohong Fan, MD, PhD, a Medical Officer at the FDA was in the audience and said the people at the FDA really want to help, that they feel it’s part of their mission.

Mills said he had no doubts that the people at the FDA are committed and passionate about what they do. He says it’s not that people at the FDA aren’t working, it’s that the process isn’t working, and needs to be transformed.

“At CIRM we are saying doing nothing is not OK. It’s not OK. So we are going to be working with patients and patient advocates, companies, researchers and the FDA to make change, to make it easier for patients to get access to the therapies they need.”