Evangelina Padilla-Vaccaro

A conversation with Bob Klein about the past, present and future of CIRM

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment
Bob Klein

Anyone who knows anything about CIRM knows about Bob Klein. He’s the main author and driving force behind both Proposition 71 and Proposition 14, the voter-approved ballot initiatives that first created and then refunded CIRM. It’s safe to say that without Bob there’d be no CIRM.

Recently we had the great good fortune to sit down with Bob to chat about the challenges of getting a proposition on the ballot in a time of pandemic and electoral pandemonium, what he thinks CIRM’s biggest achievements are (so far) and what his future plans are.

You can hear that conversation in the latest episode of our podcast, “Talking ’bout (re) Generation”.

Enjoy.

CIRM-funded life-saving stem cell therapy gets nod of approval from FDA

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Cured_AR_2016_coverIf you have read our 2016 Annual Report (and if you haven’t you should, it’s brilliant) or just seen the cover you’ll know that it features very prominently a young girl named Evie Padilla Vaccaro.

Evie was born with Severe Combined Immunodeficiency or SCID – also known as “bubble baby disease”; we’ve written about it here. SCID is a rare but deadly immune disorder which leaves children unable to fight off simple infections. Many children with SCID die in the first few years of life.

Fortunately for Evie and her family, Dr. Don Kohn and his team at UCLA, working with a UK-based company called Orchard Therapeutics Ltd., have developed a treatment called OTL-101. This involves taking the patient’s own blood stem cells, genetically modifying them to correct the SCID mutation, and then returning the cells to the patient. Those modified cells create a new blood supply, and repair the child’s immune system.

Evie was treated with OTL-101 when she was a few months old. She is cured. And she isn’t the only one. To date more than 40 children have been treated with this method. All have survived and are doing well.

Orchard Therapeutics

 FDA acknowledgement

Because of that success the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted OTL-101 Rare Pediatric Disease Designation. This status is given to a treatment that targets a serious or life-threatening disease that affects less than 200,000 people, most of whom are under 18 years of age.

The importance of the Rare Pediatric Disease Designation is that it gives the company certain incentives for the therapy’s development, including priority review by the FDA. That means if it continues to show it is safe and effective it may have a faster route to being made more widely available to children in need.

In a news release Anne Dupraz, PhD, Orchard’s Chief Regulatory Officer, welcomed the decision:

“Together with Orphan Drug and Breakthrough Therapy Designations, this additional designation is another important development step for the OTL-101 clinical program. It reflects the potential of this gene therapy treatment to address the significant unmet medical need of children with ADA-SCID and eligibility for a Pediatric Disease Priority Review voucher at time of approval.”

Creating a trend

This is the second time in less than two weeks that a CIRM-funded therapy has been awarded Rare Pediatric Disease designation. Earlier this month Capricor Therapeutics was given that status for its treatment for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

Two other CIRM-funded clinical trials – Humacyte and jCyte – have been given Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designation (RMAT) by the FDA. This makes them eligible for earlier and faster interactions with the FDA, and also means they may be able to apply for priority review and faster approval.

All these are encouraging signs for a couple of reasons. It suggests that the therapies are showing real promise in clinical trials. And it shows that the FDA is taking steps to encourage those therapies to advance as quickly – and safely of course – as possible.

Credit where credit is due

In the past we have been actively critical of the FDA’s sluggish pace in moving stem cell therapies out of the lab and into clinical trials where they can be tested in people. So when the FDA does show signs of changing the way it works it’s appropriate that that we are actively supportive.

Getting these designations is, of course, no guarantee the therapies will ultimately prove to be successful. But if they are, creating faster pathways means they can get to patients, the people who really need them, at a much faster pace.

 

 

 

 

 

Bye Bye bubble baby disease: promising results from stem cell gene therapy trial for SCID

/ Todd Dubnicoff / 1 Comment

Evangelina Padilla-Vaccaro
(Front cover of CIRM’s 2016 Annual Report)

You don’t need to analyze any data to know for yourself that Evangelina Vaccaro’s experimental stem cell therapy has cured her of a devastating, often fatal disease of the immune system. All you have to do is look at a photo or video of her to see that she’s now a happy, healthy 5-year-old with a full life ahead of her.

But a casual evaluation of one patient won’t get therapies approved in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Instead, a very careful collection of quantitative data from a series of clinical trial studies is a must to prove that a treatment is safe and effective. Each study’s results also provide valuable information on how to tweak the procedures to improve each follow on clinical trial.

A CIRM-funded clinical trial study published this week by a UCLA research team in the Journal of Clinical Investigation did just that. Of the ten participants in the trial, nine including Evangelina were cured of adenosine deaminase-deficient severe combined immunodeficiency, or ADA-SCID, a disease that is usually fatal within the first year of life if left untreated.

In the past, children with SCID were isolated in a germ-free sterile clear plastic bubbles, thus the name “bubble baby disease”. [Credit: Baylor College of Medicine Archives]

ADA-SCID, also referred to as bubble baby disease, is so lethal because it destroys the ability to fight off disease. Affected children have a mutation in the adenosine deaminase gene which, in early development, causes the death of cells that normally would give rise to the immune system. Without those cells, ADA-SCID babies are born without an effective immune system. Even the common cold can be fatal so they must be sheltered in clean environments with limited physical contact with family and friends and certainly no outdoor play.

A few treatments exist but they have limitations. The go-to treatment is a blood stem cell transplant (also known as a bone marrow transplant) from a sibling with matched blood. The problem is that a match isn’t always available and a less than perfect match can lead to serious, life-threatening complications. Another treatment called enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) involves a twice-weekly injection of the missing adenosine deaminase enzyme. This approach is not only expensive but its effectiveness in restoring the immune system varies over a lifetime.

Evangelina being treated by Don Kohn and his team in 2012.  Photo: UCLA

The current study led by Don Kohn, avoids donor cells and enzyme therapy altogether by fixing the mutation in the patient’s own cells. Blood stem cells are isolated from a bone marrow sample and taken back to the lab where a functional copy of the adenosine deaminase gene is inserted into the patient’s cells. When those cells are ready, the patient is subjected to drugs – the same type that are used in cancer therapy – that kill off a portion of the patient’s faulty immune system to provide space in the bone marrow. Then the repaired blood stem cells are transplanted back into the body where they settle into the bone marrow and give rise to a healthy new immune system.

The ten patients were treated between 2009 and 2012 and their health was followed up for at least four years. As of June 2016, nine of the patients in the trial – (all infants except for an eight-year old) – no longer need enzyme injections and have working immune systems that allow them to play outside, attend school and survive colds and other infections that inevitably get passed around the classroom. The tenth patient was fifteen years old at the time of the trial and their treatment was not effective suggesting that early intervention is important. No serious side effects were seen in any of the patients.

Evangelina V

Evangelina Vaccaro (far right), who received Dr. Kohn’s treatment for bubble baby disease in 2012, with her family before her first day of school. Photo: UCLA, courtesy of the Vaccaro family

Now, this isn’t the first ever stem cell gene therapy clinical trial to successfully treat ADA-SCID. Kohn’s team and others have carried out clinical trials over the past few decades, and this current study builds upon the insights of those previous results. In a 2014 press release reporting preliminary results of this week’s published journal article, Kohn described the importance of these follow-on clinical trials for ensuring the therapy’s success:

UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center 160401

Don Kohn

“We were very happy that over the course of several clinical trials and after making refinements and improvements to the treatment protocol, we are now able to provide a cure for babies with this devastating disease using the child’s own cells.”

The team’s next step is getting FDA approval to use this treatment in all children with ADA-SCID. To reach this aim, the team is carrying out another clinical trial which will test a frozen preparation of the repaired blood stem cells. Being able to freeze the therapy product buys researchers more time to do a thorough set of safety tests on the cells before transplanting them into the patient. A frozen product is also much easier to transport for treating children who live far from the laboratories that perform the gene therapy. In November of last year, CIRM’s governing Board awarded Kohn’s team $20 million to support this project.

If everything goes as planned, this treatment will be the first stem cell gene therapy ever approved in the U.S. We look forward to adding many new photos next to Evangelina’s as more and more children are cured of ADA-SCID.

Cured by Stem Cells

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

cirm-2016-annual-report-web-12

To get anywhere you need a good map, and you need to check it constantly to make sure you are still on the right path and haven’t strayed off course. A year ago the CIRM Board gave us a map, a Strategic Plan, that laid out our course for the next five years. Our Annual Report for 2016, now online, is our way of checking that we are still on the right path.

I think, without wishing to boast, that it’s safe to say not only are we on target, but we might even be a little bit ahead of schedule.

The Annual Report is chock full of facts and figures but at the heart of it are the stories of the people who are the focus of all that we do, the patients. We profile six patients and one patient advocate, each of whom has an extraordinary story to tell, and each of whom exemplifies the importance of the work we support.

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Brenden Whittaker: Cured

Two stand out for one simple reason, they were both cured of life-threatening conditions. Now, cured is not a word we use lightly. The stem cell field has been rife with hyperbole over the years so we are always very cautious in the way we talk about the impact of treatments. But in these two cases there is no need to hold back: Evangelina Padilla Vaccaro and Brenden Whittaker have been cured.

evangelina

Evangelina: Cured

 

In the coming weeks we’ll feature our conversations with all those profiled in the Annual Report, giving you a better idea of the impact the stem cell treatments have had on their lives and the lives of their family. But today we just wanted to give a broad overview of the Annual Report.

The Strategic Plan was very specific in the goals it laid out for us. As an agency we had six big goals, but each Team within the agency, and each individual within those teams had their own goals. They were our own mini-maps if you like, to help us keep track of where we were individually, knowing that every time an individual met a goal they helped the Team get closer to meeting its goals.

As you read through the report you’ll see we did a pretty good job of meeting our targets. In fact, we missed only one and we’re hoping to make up for that early in 2017.

But good as 2016 was, we know that to truly fulfill our mission of accelerating treatments to patients with unmet medical needs we are going to have do equally well, if not even better, in 2017.

That work starts today.

 

Stem cell heroes: patients who had life-saving, life-changing treatments inspire CIRM Board

/ Kevin McCormack / 7 Comments

 

Christian & Alysia Padilla-Vaccaro with daughters Annabella and Evangelina, Randy Mills, Isabelle Javier and son Jake, CIRM Board Vice Chair Art Torres, Vita Trede, Karl Trede, Brenden Whittaker, Becky Whittaker, CIRM Board Chair Jonathan Thomas ,

It’s not an easy thing to bring an entire Board of Directors to tears, but four extraordinary people and their families managed to do just that at the last CIRM Board meeting of 2016.

The four are patients who have undergone life-saving or life-changing stem cell therapies that were funded by our agency. The patients and their families shared their stories with the Board as part of CIRM President & CEO Randy Mill’s preview of our Annual Report, a look back at our achievements over the last year.

The four included:

jake_javier_stories_of_hope

Jake Javier, whose life changed in a heartbeat the day before he graduated high school, when he dove into a swimming pool and suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the chest down. A stem cell transplant is giving him hope he may regain the use of his arms and hands.

 

 

karl

Karl Trede who had just recovered from one life-threatening disease when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and became the first person ever treated with a new anti-tumor therapy that helped hold the disease at bay.

 

brenden_stories_of_hopeBrenden Whittaker, born with a rare immune disorder that left his body unable to fight off bacterial or fungal infections. Repeated infections cost Brenden part of his lung and liver and almost killed him. A stem cell treatment that gave him a healthy immune system cured him.

 

 

evangelinaEvangelina Padilla Vaccaro was born with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), also known as “bubbly baby” disease, which left her unable to fight off infections. Her future looked grim until she got a stem cell transplant that gave her a new blood system and a healthy immune system. Today, she is cured.

 

 

Normally CIRM Board meetings are filled with important, albeit often dry, matters such as approving new intellectual property regulations or a new research concept plan. But it’s one thing to vote to approve a clinical trial, and a very different thing to see the people whose lives you have helped change by funding that trial.

You cannot help but be deeply moved when you hear a mother share her biggest fear that her daughter would never live long enough to go to kindergarten and is now delighted to see her lead a normal life; or hear a young man who wondered if he would make it to his 24th birthday now planning to go to college to be a doctor

When you know you played a role in making these dreams happen, it’s impossible not to be inspired, and doubly determined to do everything possible to ensure many others like them have a similar chance at life.

You can read more about these four patients in our new Stories of Hope: The CIRM Stem Cell Four feature on the CIRM website. Additionally, here is a video of those four extraordinary people and their families telling their stories:

We will have more extraordinary stories to share with you when we publish our Annual Report on January 1st. 2016 was a big year for CIRM. We are determined to make 2017 even bigger.