CIRM Research

A clear vision for the future

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Dr. Henry Klassen and Dr. Jing Yang, founders of jCyte

When you have worked with a group of people over many years the relationship becomes more than just a business venture, it becomes personal. That’s certainly the case with jCyte, a company founded by Drs. Henry Klassen and Jing Yang, aimed at finding a cure for a rare form of vision loss called retinitis pigmentosa. CIRM has been supporting this work since it’s early days and so on Friday, the news that jCyte has entered into a partnership with global ophthalmology company Santen was definitely a cause for celebration.

The partnership could be worth up to $252 million and includes an immediate payment of $62 million. The agreement also connects jCyte to Santen’s global business and medical network, something that could prove invaluable in bringing their jCell therapy to patients outside the US.

Here in the US, jCyte is getting ready to start a Phase 2 clinical trial – which CIRM is funding – that could prove pivotal in helping it get approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.

As Dr. Maria Millan, CIRM’s President and CEO says, we have been fortunate to watch this company steadily progress from having a promising idea to developing a life-changing therapy.

“This is exciting news for everyone at jCyte. They have worked so hard over many years to develop their therapy and this partnership is a reflection of just how much they have achieved. For us at CIRM it’s particularly encouraging. We have supported this work from its early stages through clinical trials. The people who have benefited from the therapy, people like Rosie Barrero, are not just patients to us, they have become friends. The people who run the company, Dr. Henry Klassen, Dr. Jing Yang and CEO Paul Bresge, are so committed and so passionate about their work that they have overcome many obstacles to bring them here, an RMAT designation from the Food and Drug Administration, and a deal that will help them advance their work even further and faster. That is what CIRM is about, following the science and the mission.”

Paul Bresge, jCyte’s CEO says they couldn’t have done it without CIRM’s early and continued investment.

Paul Bresge, jCyte CEO

“jCyte is extremely grateful to CIRM, which was established to support innovative regenerative medicine programs and research such as ours.  CIRM supported our early preclinical data all the way through our late stage clinical trials.  This critical funding gave us the unique ability and flexibility to put patients first in each and every decision that we made along the way. In addition to the funding, the guidance that we have received from the CIRM team has been invaluable. jCell would not be possible without the early support from CIRM, our team at jCyte, and patients with degenerative retinal diseases are extremely appreciative for your support.”

Here is Rosie Barrero talking about the impact jCell has had on her life and the life of her family.

“Brains” in a dish that can create electrical impulses

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
Brain organoids in a petri dish: photo courtesy UCSD

For several years, researchers have been able to take stem cells and use them to make three dimensional structures called organoids. These are a kind of mini organ that scientists can then use to study what happens in the real thing. For example, creating kidney organoids to see how kidney disease develops in patients.

Scientists can do the same with brain cells, creating clumps of cells that become a kind of miniature version of parts of the brain. These organoids can’t do any of the complex things our brains do – such as thinking – but they do serve as useful physical models for us to use in trying to develop a deeper understanding of the brain.

Now Alysson Muotri and his team at UC San Diego – in a study supported by two grants from CIRM – have taken the science one step further, developing brain organoids that allow us to measure the level of electrical activity they generate, and then compare it to the electrical activity seen in the developing brain of a fetus. That last sentence might cause some people to say “What?”, but this is actually really cool science that could help us gain a deeper understanding of how brains develop and come up with new ways to treat problems in the brain caused by faulty circuitry, such as autism or schizophrenia.

The team developed new, more effective methods of growing clusters of the different kinds of cells found in the brain. They then placed them on a multi-electrode array, a kind of muffin tray that could measure electrical impulses. As they fed the cells and increased the number of cells in the trays they were able to measure changes in the electrical impulses they gave off. The cells went from producing 3,000 spikes a minute to 300,000 spikes a minute. This is the first time this level of activity has been achieved in a cell-based laboratory model. But that’s not all.

When they further analyzed the activity of the organoids, they found there were some similarities to the activity seen in the brains of premature babies. For instance, both produced short bursts of activity, followed by a period of inactivity.

Alysson Muotri

In a news release Muotri says they were surprised by the finding:

“We couldn’t believe it at first — we thought our electrodes were malfunctioning. Because the data were so striking, I think many people were kind of skeptical about it, and understandably so.”

Muotri knows that this research – published in the journal Cell Stem Cell – raises ethical issues and he is quick to say that these organoids are nothing like a baby’s brain, that they differ in several critical ways. The organoids are tiny, not just in size but also in the numbers of cells involved. They also don’t have blood vessels to keep them alive or help them grow and they don’t have any ability to think.

“They are far from being functionally equivalent to a full cortex, even in a baby. In fact, we don’t yet have a way to even measure consciousness or sentience.”

What these organoids do have is the ability to help us look at the structure and activity of the brain in ways we never could before. In the past researchers depended on mice or other animals to test new ideas or therapies for human diseases or disorders. Because our brains are so different than animal brains those approaches have had limited results. Just think about how many treatments for Alzheimer’s looked promising in animal models but failed completely in people.

These new organoids allow us to explore how new therapies might work in the human brain, and hopefully increase our ability to develop more effective treatments for conditions as varied as epilepsy and autism.

CIRM Supported Scientist Makes Surprising Discovery with Parasitic Gut Worms

/ Adonica Shaw / Leave a comment

 

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Image of gut lining and parasites.  Photo courtesy of UCSF/ Michael Fortes

 

It’s no secret that researchers have long believed adult stem cells could contribute to wound healing in the gut and skin, but in a new paper in Nature — a group of scientists at UC San Francisco made a surprising discovery.

Through several experiments using parasitic worms in the mouse gut, they found that as parasites dug into the intestinal walls of mice, the gut responded in an unexpected way – by reactivating a type of cell growth previously seen in fetal tissues.

So why is this important?

Simply put, it gives scientists new targets to go after. According to UCSF CIRM supported scientist Ophir Klein, MD, Ph.D., this discovery could be paradigm-shifting in terms of our understanding of how the mammalian body can repair damage and could help scientists develop more ways to enhance the body’s natural healing abilities.

Adult stem cells in the intestines are vital for maintaining the digestive status quo. The gut lining is made up of epithelial cells which absorb nutrients and produce protective mucus. These cells are replaced every few days by the stem cells at the base of crypts — indentations in the gut lining. Researchers expected that the same stem cells could also help repair tears in the gut.

How did they do it?

Larvae from parasites like H. polygyrus invade the gut lining in a mouse’s intestine, burying themselves to develop in the tissue. Based on prevailing ideas in the field, the scientists predicted that, in response, nearby stem cells would increase their productivity and patch up the worm-created wounds, but that is not what happened.

Instead, signs of the stem cells in worm-infected areas disappeared entirely; fluorescent markers that should have been expressed by one of the genes in the regular stem cell program completely vanished. And yet, even with no identifiable stem cells in the area, the wounded tissue regenerated more quickly than ever.

Researchers spent years trying to resolve this mystery and after a number of false starts and dead ends, the team eventually noticed the recurrence of a different gene, known as Sca-1.

Using antibody staining for the Sca-1 protein, the researchers realized that where the stem cell genes had disappeared, a different gene program was expressed instead: one that resembled the way that mouse guts develop in utero.

Upon their discovery, the researchers wondered whether the reactivation of this fetal program was a specific response to parasite infections, or if it could be a general strategy for many kinds of gut injury. Additional experiments showed that shutting down gut stem cells with irradiation or genetically targeting them for destruction triggered aspects of the same response: despite an absence of detectable stem cell activity, undifferentiated tissue grew rapidly nonetheless.

Later, once the acute injury is repaired, the gut may return to the normal stem cell program of producing differentiated cells that perform specific functions.

Many other injured tissues could benefit from the ability to quickly and efficiently make generalized repairs before returning to specialized adult cell production, opening up therapeutic opportunities. For example, developing treatments that bestow an ability to control the change between adult and fetal genetic programs might offer new strategies to manage conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).