CD47

Study could pave the way in reducing decline in muscle strength as people age 

/ Esteban Cortez / Leave a comment

A study by Stanford Medicine researchers in older mice may lead to treatments that help seniors regain muscle strength lost to aging.

Muscle stem cells—which are activated in response to muscle injury to regenerate damaged muscle tissue—lose their potency with age. A study from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that five percent of adults aged 60 and over had weak muscle strength, and thirteen percent had intermediate muscle strength. 

Now, researchers at Stanford Medicine are seeing that old mice regain the leg muscle strength of younger animals after receiving an antibody treatment that targets a pathway mediated by a molecule called CD47.  

The study was published in Cell Stem Cell and is co-funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).  

A Closer Look at CD47 

CD47 is a protein found on the surface of many cells in the body. Billed as the “don’t eat me” molecule, it is better known as a target for cancer immunotherapy. It’s common on the surface of many cancer cells and protects them from immune cells that patrol the body looking for dysfunctional or abnormal cells.  

Stanford researchers are finding that old muscle stem cells may use a similar approach to avoid being targeted by the immune system. 

It’s been difficult to determine why muscle stem cells lose their ability to divide rapidly in response to injury or exercise as they age. Dr. Ermelinda Porpiglia, the lead author of the study, used a technique called “single-cell mass cytometry” to study mouse muscle stem cells.  

Using the technique, Porpiglia focused on CD47, and found that the molecule was found at high levels on the surface of some muscle stem cells in older mice, but at lower levels in younger animals. Porpiglia also found that high levels of CD47 on the surface of muscle stem cells correlate with a decrease in their function.   

“This finding was unexpected because we primarily think of CD47 as an immune regulator,” Porpiglia said. “But it makes sense that, much like cancer cells, aged stem cells might be using CD47 to escape the immune system.” 

Testing an Antibody 

Further investigation revealed that a molecule called thrombospondin, which binds to CD47 on the surface of the muscle stem cells, suppresses the muscle stem cells’ activity.  

Porpiglia showed that an antibody that recognizes thrombospondin and blocks its ability to bind to CD47 dramatically affected the function of muscle stem cells. Cells from older animals divided more robustly when growing in a laboratory dish in the presence of the antibody, and when the antibody was injected into the leg muscles of old mice the animals developed bigger and stronger leg muscles than control animals.  

When given prior to injury, the antibody helped the aged animals recover in ways similar to younger mice. 

Porpiglia said, “We are hopeful that it might one day be possible to inject an antibody to thrombospondin at specific sites in the body to regenerate muscle in older people or to counteract functional problems due to disease or surgery.” 

These results are significant because they could one day make it possible to boost muscle recovery in humans after surgery and reduce the decline in muscle strength as people age, but researchers say more work is needed.  

“Rejuvenating the muscle stem cell population in older mice led to a significant increase in strength,” said Dr. Helen Blau, a senior author of the study. “This is a localized treatment that could be useful in many clinical settings, although more work needs to be done to determine whether this approach will be safe and effective in humans.” 

CIRM has previously funded work with researchers using CD47 that led to clinical trials targeting cancer. You can read about that work here and here. That work led to the creation of a company, Forty Seven Inc, which was eventually bought by Gilead for $4.9 billion.  

Read the original release by Krista Conger on the Stanford Medicine website. 

Saying thanks and farewell to a friend

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment
Tom Howing

In this job you get to meet a lot of remarkable people, none more so than the patients who volunteer to take part in what are giant experiments. They are courageous pioneers, willing to be among the first people to ever try a new therapy, knowing that it may not help them and, potentially, might even harm them.

Tom Howing was one such person. I got to know Tom when we were putting together our 2017 Annual Report. Back in 2015 Tom was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer that had spread throughout his body. He underwent surgery and chemotherapy. That worked for a while, but then the cancer returned. So, Tom had more surgery and chemotherapy. Again, it worked for a while but when the cancer returned again Tom was running out of options.

That’s when he learned about a clinical trial with a company called Forty Seven Inc. that was testing a new anti-cancer therapy that CIRM was supporting. Tom says he didn’t hesitate.

“When I was diagnosed with cancer I knew I had battle ahead of me. After the cancer came back again they recommended I try this CD47 clinical trial. I said absolutely, let’s give it a spin. I guess one is always a bit concerned whenever you put the adjective “experimental” in front of anything. But I’ve always been a very optimistic and positive person and have great trust and faith in my caregivers.”

Optimistic and positive are great ways to describe Tom. Happily, his optimism was rewarded. The therapy worked.

“Scans and blood tests came back showing that the cancer appears to be held in check. My energy level is fantastic. The treatment that I had is so much less aggressive than chemo, my quality of life is just outstanding.”

But after a year or so Tom had to drop out of the trial. He tried other therapies and they kept the cancer at bay. For a while. But it kept coming back. And eventually Tom ran out of options. And last week, he ran out of time.

Tom was a truly fine man. He was kind, caring, funny, gracious and always grateful for what he had. He talked often about his family and how the stem cell therapy helped him spend not just more time with them, but quality time.

He knew when he signed up for the therapy that there were no guarantees, but he wanted to try, saying that even if it didn’t help him that the researchers might learn something to help others down the line.

“The most important thing I would say is, I want people to know there is always hope and to stay positive.”

Tom ultimately lost his battle with cancer. But he never lost his spirit, his delight in his family and his desire to keep going as long as he could. In typical Tom fashion he preferred to put his concerns aside and cheer others along.

“To all those people who are putting in all the hours at the bench and microscope, it’s important for them to know that they are making a huge impact on the lives of real people and they should celebrate it and revel in it and take great pride in it.”

We consider ourselves fortunate to have known Tom and to have been with him on part of his journey. He touched our lives, as he touched the lives of so many others. Our thoughts and wishes go out to his family and friends. He will be remembered, because we never forget our friends.

A few years ago Tom came and talked to the CIRM Board. Here is the video of that event.

A model for success

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

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

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

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

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

Those three elements are:

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

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

3. Championing the portfolio and proactively engaging potential industry partners

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

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

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

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

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

And we have.

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

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

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

CIRM-funded treatment for cancer granted FDA breakthrough therapy designation

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Mark Chao, M.D., Ph.D., cofounder of Forty Seven, Inc. and current VP of oncology clinical research at Gilead Sciences

An antibody therapeutic, magrolimab, being tested for myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a group of cancers in which the bone marrow does not produce enough healthy blood cells , was granted breakthrough therapy designation with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). 

Breakthrough therapy designations from the FDA are intended to help expedite the development of new treatments. They require preliminary clinical evidence that demonstrates that the treatment may have substantial improvement in comparison to therapy options currently available. CIRM funded a Phase 1b trial in MDS and acute myeloid leukemia (AML), another type of blood cancer, that provided the data on which the breakthrough therapy designation is based.

Cancer cells express a signal known as CD47, which sends a “don’t eat me” message to macrophages, white blood cells that are part of the immune system designed to “eat” and destroy unhealthy cells. Magrolimab works by blocking the signal, enabling the body’s own immune system to detect and destroy the cancer cells.

Magrolimab was initially developed by a team led by Irv Weissman, M.D. at Stanford University with the support of CIRM awards. This led to the formation of Forty Seven, Inc., which was subsequently acquired by Gilead Sciences in April 2020 for $4.9 billion (learn more about other highlighted partnership events on CIRM’s Industry Alliance Program website by clicking here).

In CIRM’s 2019-2020 18-Month Report, Mark Chao, M.D., Ph.D.,  who co-founded Forty Seven, Inc. and currently serves as the VP of oncology clinical research at Gilead Sciences, credits CIRM with helping progress this treatment.

“CIRM’s support has been instrumental to our ability to rapidly progress Forty Seven’s CD47 antibody targeting approach.”

Magrolimab is currently being studied as a combination therapy with azacitidine, a chemotherapy drug, in a Phase 3 clinical trial in previously untreated higher risk MDS. This is one of the last steps before seeking FDA approval for widespread commercial use.

Merdad Parsey, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer at Gilead Sciences

In a press release, Merdad Parsey, M.D., Ph.D., Chief Medical Officer at Gilead Sciences discusses the significance of the designation from the FDA and the importance of the treatment.

“The Breakthrough Therapy designation recognizes the potential for magrolimab to help address a significant unmet medical need for people with MDS and underscores the transformative potential of Gilead’s immuno-oncology therapies in development.”

CIRM Highlights Industrial Alliance Program (IAP)

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment

In the addition to the innovative scientists and clinicians who conceive and develop novel experimental therapies, it takes a village to drive a promising experimental therapy through phases of clinical trials, regulatory marketing approval, and commercialization before it becomes broadly accessible to patients with unmet medical needs. In this case, the village is the broader industry including institutional investors and biopharma companies that have the capital, resources and expertise to carry the development programs past the finish line. 

A big part of what CIRM does revolves around nurturing projects at the very early stages. By providing funding and guidance through our collaborative team of experts, CIRM de-risks its therapy development programs through pre-clinical and clinical stages, thereby readying them for industry partnerships to support them through the last mile. CIRM funding to California academic institutions has enabled the launch of more than 40 spinout companies, one of which we will highlight below.

On April 7th, 2020, Forty Seven, Inc. was acquired by Gilead Sciences for $4.9 billion. CIRM funded the preclinical and early clinical development of an anti-CD47 antibody candidate for cancer at Stanford and subsequently funded two Forty Seven clinical trials. Now, Gilead will leverage all of its resources to accelerate the development of this promising cancer immunotherapy.

Dr. Mark Chao, Co-Founder, Forty Seven, Inc. had this to say about CIRM.

“CIRM’s support has been instrumental to our early successes and our ability to rapidly progress Forty Seven’s CD47 antibody targeting approach with magrolimab. CIRM was an early collaborator in our clinical programs and it’s support was instrumental in helping us reach a point where we could become a part of Gilead and move forward with our research.”

To proactively enable more partnering successes such as Forty Seven, CIRM has established the Industry Alliance Program (IAP) as a direct opportunity for the industry to partner with CIRM grantees in accelerating the most promising stem cell, gene and regenerative medicine therapy programs to commercialization. Through the IAP, CIRM is a dedicated and proactive partner to industry and CIRM grantees.

We recently launched a website for those interested in knowing more about these partnerships. It describes the IAP program in more detail can be accessed by clicking here.

If you are a potential industry partner wishing to learn more about CIRM’s IAP, please contact:

Big time validation for early support

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

It’s not every day that a company and a concept that you helped support from the very beginning gets snapped up for $4.9 billion. But that’s what is happening with Forty Seven Inc. and their anti-cancer therapies. Gilead, another California company by the way, has announced it is buying Forty Seven Inc. for almost $5 billion.

The deal gives Gilead access to Forty Seven’s lead antibody therapy, magrolimab, which switches off CD47, a kind of “do not eat me” signal that cancer cells use to evade the immune system.

CIRM has supported this program from its very earliest stages, back in 2013, when it was a promising idea in need of funding. Last year we blogged about the progress it has made from a hopeful concept to an exciting therapy.

When Forty Seven Inc. went public in 2018, Dr. Irv Weissman, one of the founders of the company, attributed a lot of their success to CIRM’s support.

Dr. Irv Weissman

“The story of the funding of this work all of the way to its commercialization and the clinical trials reported in the New England Journal of Medicine is simply this: CIRM funding of a competitive grant took a mouse discovery of the CD47 ‘don’t eat me’ signal through all preclinical work to and through a phase 1 IND with the FDA. Our National Institutes of Health (NIH) did not fund any part of the clinical trial or preclinical run up to the trial, so it is fortunate for those patients and those that will follow, if the treatment continues its success in larger trials, that California voters took the state’s right action to fund research not funded by the federal government.”

Dr. Maria Millan, CIRM’s President & CEO, says the deal is a perfect example of CIRM’s value to the field of regenerative medicine and our ability to work with our grantees to make them as successful as possible.

“To say this is incredible would be an understatement! Words cannot describe how excited we are that this novel approach to battling currently untreatable malignancies has the prospect of making it to patients in need and this is a major step. Speaking on behalf of CIRM, we are very honored to have been a partner with Forty Seven Inc. from the very beginning.

CIRM Senior Science Officer, Dr. Ingrid Caras, was part of the team that helped a group of academic scientists take their work out of the lab and into the real world.

“I had the pleasure of working with and helping the Stanford team since CIRM provided the initial funding to translate the idea of developing CD47 blockade as a therapeutic approach. This was a team of superb scientists who we were fortunate to work closely with them to navigate the Regulatory environment and develop a therapeutic product. We were able to provide guidance as well as funding and assist in the ultimate success of this project.”

Forty Seven Inc. is far from the only example of this kind of support and collaboration. We have always seen ourselves as far more than just a funding agency. Money is important, absolutely. But so too is bringing the experience and expertise of our team to help academic scientists take a promising idea and turn it into a successful therapy.

After all that’s what our mission is, doing all we can to accelerate stem cell therapies to patients with unmet medical needs. And after a deal like this, Forty Seven Inc. is definitely accelerating its work.

Two CIRM supported studies highlighted in Nature as promising approaches for blood disorders

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Blood stem cells (blue) are cleared from the bone marrow (purple) before new stem cells can be transplanted.Credit: Dennis Kunkel Microscopy/SPL

Problems with blood stem cells, a type of stem cell in your bone marrow that gives rise to various kinds of blood cells, can sometimes result in blood cancer as well as genetic and autoimmune diseases.

It is because of this that researchers have looked towards blood stem cell transplants, which involves replacing a person’s defective blood stem cells with healthy ones take from either a donor or the patient themselves.

However, before this can be done, the existing population of defective stem cells must be eradicated in order to allow the transplanted blood stem cells to properly anchor themselves into the bone marrow. Current options for this include full-body radiation or chemotherapy, but these approaches are extremely toxic.

But what if there was a way to selectively target these blood stem cells in order to make the transplants much safer?

An article published in Nature highlights the advancements made in the field of blood stem cell transplantation, some of which is work that is funded by yours truly.

One of the approaches highlighted involves the work that we funded related to Forty Seven and an antibody created that inhibits a protein called CD47.

The article discusses how Forty Seven tested two antibodies in monkeys. One antibody blocks the activity of a molecule called c-Kit, which is found on blood stem cells. The other is the antibody that blocks CD47, which is found on some immune cells. Inhibiting CD47 allows those immune cells to sweep up the stem cells that were targeted by the c-Kit antibody, thereby boosting its effectiveness. In early tests, the two antibodies used together reduced the number of blood stem cells in bone marrow. The next step for this team is to demonstrate that the treatment clears out the old supply of stem cells well enough to allow transplanted cells to flourish.

You can read more about the CD47 antibody in a previous blog post.

Another notable segment of this article is the CIRM funded trial that is being conducted by Dr. Judith Shizuru at Stanford University. This clinical trial also uses an antibody that targets c-Kit found on blood stem cells.

The purpose of this trial is to wipe out the problematic blood stem cells in infants with X-linked Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a rare fatal genetic disorder that leaves infants without a functional immune system, in order to introduce properly functioning blood stem cells. Dr. Shizuru and her team found that transplanted blood stem cells, in this case from donors who did not have the disease, successfully took hold in the bone marrow of four out of six of the babies.

You can read more about Dr. Shizuru’s work in a previous blog post as well.

Newly discovered “don’t eat me” signal shows potential for ovarian and triple-negative breast cancer treatment

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Stanford researchers have found that cancer cells have a protein called CD24 on their surface that enables them to protect themselves against the body’s immune cells.
Courtesy of Shutterstock

Getting a breast cancer diagnosis is devastating news in and of itself. Currently, there are treatment options that target three different types of receptors, which are named hormone epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2), estrogen receptors (ER), and progesterone receptors (PR), commonly found in breast cancer cells, . Unfortunately, in triple-negative breast cancer, which occurs in 10-20% of breast cancer cases, all three receptors are absent, making this form of breast cancer very aggressive and difficult to treat.

In recent years, researchers have discovered that proteins on the cell surface can tell macrophages, an immune cell designed to detect and engulf foreign or abnormal cells, not to eat and destroy them. This can be useful to help normal cells keep the immune system from attacking them, but cancer cells can also use these “don’t eat me” signals to hide from the immune system. 

An illustration of a macrophage, a vital part of the immune system, engulfing and destroying a cancer cell. Antibody 5F9 blocks a “don’t eat me” signal emitted from cancer cells. Courtesy of Forty Seven, Inc.

In fact, because of this concept, a CIRM-funded clinical trial is being conducted that uses an antibody called 5F9 to block a “don’t eat me” signal known as CD47 that is found in cancer cells. The results of this trial, which have been announced in a previous blog post, are very promising.

Further building on this concept, a CIRM-funded study has now discovered a potential new target for triple-negative breast cancer as well as ovarian cancer. Dr. Irv Weissman and a team of researchers at Stanford University have discovered an additional “don’t eat me” signal called CD24 that cancers seem to use to evade detection and destruction by the immune system.

In a press release, Dr. Weissman talks about his work with CD47 and states that,

“Finding that not all patients responded to anti-CD47 antibodies helped fuel our research at Stanford to test whether non-responder cells and patients might have alternative ‘don’t eat me’ signals.” 

The scientists began by looking for signals that were produced more highly in cancers than in the tissues from which the cancers arose. It is here that they discovered CD24 and then proceeded to implant human breast cancer cells in mice for testing. When the CD24 signaling was blocked, the mice’s immune system attacked the cancer cells.

An important discovery was that ovarian and triple-negative breast cancer were highly affected by blocking of CD24 signaling. The other interesting discovery was that the effectiveness of CD24 blockage seems to be complementary to CD47 blockage. In other words, some cancers, like blood cancers, seem to be highly susceptible to blocking CD47, but not to CD24 blockage. For other cancers, like ovarian cancer, the opposite is true. This could suggest that most cancers will be susceptible to the immune system by blocking the CD24 or CD47 signal, and that cancers may be even more vulnerable when more than one “don’t eat me” signal is blocked.

Dr. Weissman and his team are now hopeful that potential therapies to block CD24 signaling will follow in the footsteps of the clinical trials related to CD47.

The full results to the study were published in Nature.

CIRM funded clinical trial shows promising results for patients with blood cancers

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
An illustration of a macrophage, a vital part of the immune system, engulfing and destroying a cancer cell. Antibody 5F9 blocks a “don’t eat me” signal emitted from cancer cells.
Courtesy of Forty Seven, Inc.

Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are both types of blood cancers that can be difficult to treat. CIRM is funding Forty Seven, Inc. to conduct a clinical trial to treat patients with these blood cancers with an antibody called 5F9. CIRM has also given multiple awards prior to the clinical trial to help in developing the antibody.

Cancer cells express a signal known as CD47, which sends a “don’t eat me” message to macrophages, which are white blood cells that are part of the immune system designed to “eat” and destroy unhealthy cells. The antibody works by blocking the signal, enabling the body’s own immune system to detect and destroy the cancer cells.

In a press release, Forty Seven, Inc. announced early clinical results from their CIRM funded trial using the antibody to treat patients with AML and MDS. Some patients received just the antibody while others received the antibody in combination with azacitidine, a chemotherapy drug used to treat these cancers.

Here is a synopsis of the trial:

  • 35 patients treated in a Phase 1 clinical trial have been evaluated for a response assessment to-date.
  • 10 of these have MDS or AML and only received the 5F9 antibody.
  • 11 of these have higher-risk MDS and received the 5F9 antibody along with the chemotherapy drug azacitidine.
  • 14 of these have untreated AML and received the 5F9 antibody along with the chemotherapy drug azacitidine.

For the 11 patients with higher-risk MDS treated with the antibody and chemotherapy, they found that:

  • All 11 patients achieved an objective response rate (ORR), meaning that there was a reduction in tumor burden of a predefined amount.
  • Six of these patients achieved a complete response (CR), indicating a disappearance of all signs of cancer in response to treatment.

For the 14 patients with untreated AML treated with the antibody and chemotherapy, they found that:

  • Nine of these patients achieved an ORR.
  • Five of these nine patients achieved a CR.
  • Two of these nine patients achieved a morphologic leukemia-free state (MLFS), indicating the disappearance of all cells with formal and structural characteristics of leukemia, accompanied by bone marrow recovery, in response to treatment. 
  • The remaining five patients achieved stable disease (SD), meaning that the tumor is neither growing nor shrinking.

The results also showed that:

  • There was no evidence of increased toxicities when the antibody was used alongside the chemotherapy drugs, demonstrating tolerance and safety of the treatment.
  • No responding MDS or AML patient has relapsed or progressed on the antibody in combination with chemotherapy, with a median follow-up of 3.8 months.
  • The median time to response was rapid at 1.9 months.
  • Several patients have experienced deepening responses over time resulting in complete remissions. 

Based on the favorable results observed in this clinical trial to-date, expansion cohorts have been initiated, meaning that additional patients will be enrolled in a phase I trial. This will include patients with both higher-risk MDS and untreated AML as well as using the antibody in combination with chemotherapy.

In the press release, Dr. David Sallman, an investigator in the clinical trial, is quoted as saying,

“These new data for 5F9 show encouraging clinical activity in a broad population of patients with MDS and AML, who may be unfit for existing therapeutic options or at higher-risk for developing rapidly-advancing disease. Despite an evolving treatment landscape, physicians continue to seek new therapies for MDS and AML that can be used safely in combination with standard-of-care to help patients more rapidly achieve durable responses. To that end, I am excited to see meaningful clinical activity in a majority of patients treated with 5F9 in combination with azacitidine, with a median time to response of under two months and no relapses or progressions among responding patients.”

Saying goodbye to a good friend and a stem cell pioneer: Karl Trede

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

FrankTrede_B_0110_20161204120959_2016_12_04_CIRM_AnnualReport_KarlTrede_SanJose_Portraits_SeesTheDay

Sometimes even courage and determination are not enough. Karl Trede had courage and determination in droves as he fought a 12 year battle against cancer. He recently lost that battle. But he remains an inspiration for all who knew him.

I got to know Karl for our 2016 Annual Report. Karl had been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2006. He underwent surgery to remove his vocal cords and the cancer seemed to be in remission. But then it returned, this time having spread to his lungs. His doctors said they had pretty much run out of options but would Karl consider trying something new, something no one else had tried before; stem cells.

Karl told me he didn’t hesitate.

“I said “sure”. I don’t believe I knew at the time that I was going to be the first one but I thought I’d give it a whirl. It was an experience for me. It was eye opening. I wasn’t real concerned about being the first, I figured I was going to have to go someday so I guess if I was the first person and something really went wrong then they’d definitely learn something. So, to me, that was kind of worth my time.”

Happily nothing went wrong and the team behind the therapy (Forty Seven Inc.) definitely learned something, they learned a lot about the correct dosage for patients; invaluable information in treating future patients.

Karl’s cancer was held at bay and he was able to do the one thing that brought him more pleasure than anything else; spend time with his family, his wife Vita, their four sons and their families. He doted on his grand kids and got to see them grow, and they got to know him.

Recently the cancer returned and this time there was no holding it at bay. To the end Karl remained cheerful and positive.

KARL poster

In our office is a huge poster of Karl with the words “Every Moment Counts” at the bottom. It’s a reminder to us why we come to work every day, why the people at Forty Seven Inc. and all the other researchers we support work so hard for years and years; to try and give people like Karl a few extra moments with his family.

At the top of the poster the word “Courage” is emblazoned across it. Karl has a huge smile on his face. Karl was certainly courageous, a stem cell pioneer willing to try something no one else ever had. He was also very modest.

Here is Karl speaking to our governing Board in December 2016

When I spoke to him in 2016, despite all he had gone through in his fight against cancer, he said he had no regrets:

“I consider myself very fortunate. I’m a lucky guy.”

Those of us who got to spend just a little time with Karl know that we were the lucky ones.

Our hearts go out to his family and friends for their loss.