iPSC Bank

A Month of CIRM: Where we’ve been, where we’re going

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

All this month we are using our blog and social media to highlight a new chapter in CIRM’s life, thanks to the voters approving Proposition 14. We are looking back at what we have done since we were created in 2004, and also looking forward to the future. We kick off this event with a letter from our the Chair of our Board, Jonathan Thomas.

When voters approved Proposition 14 last November, they gave the Stem Cell Agency a new lease on life and a chance to finish the work we began with the approval of Proposition 71 in 2004. It’s a great honor and privilege. It’s also a great responsibility. But I think looking back at what we have achieved over the last 16 years shows we are well positioned to seize the moment and take CIRM and regenerative medicine to the next level and beyond.

When we started, we were told that if we managed to get one project into a clinical trial by the time our money ran out we would have done a good job. As of this moment we have 68 clinical trials that we have funded plus another 31 projects in clinical trials where we helped fund crucial early stage research. That inexorable march to therapies and cures will resume when we take up our first round of Clinical applications under Prop 14 in March.

But while clinical stage projects are the end game, where we see if therapies really work and are safe in people, there’s so much more that we have achieved since we were created. We have invested $900 million in  basic research, creating a pipeline of the most promising stem cell research programs, as well as investing heavily on so-called “translational” projects, which move projects from basic science to where they’re ready to apply to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin clinical trials.

We have funded more than 1,000 projects, with each one giving us valuable information to help advance the science. Our funding has helped attract some of the best stem cell scientists in the world to California and, because we only fund research in California, it has persuaded many companies to either move here or open offices here to be eligible for our support. We have helped create the Alpha Stem Cell Clinics, a network of leading medical centers around the state that have the experience and expertise to deliver stem cell therapies to patients. All of those have made California a global center in the field.

That result is producing big benefits for the state. An independent Economic Impact Analysis reported that by the end of 2018 we had already helped generate an extra $10.7 billion in new sales revenue and taxes for California, hundreds of millions more in federal taxes and created more than 56,000 new jobs.

As if that wasn’t enough, we have also:

  • Helped develop the largest iPSC research bank in the world.
  • Created the CIRM Center of Excellence in Stem Cell Genomics to accelerate fundamental understanding of human biology and disease mechanisms.
  • Helped fund the construction of 12 world class stem cell institutes throughout the state.
  • Reached a unique partnership with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institutes to find a cure for sickle cell disease.
  • Used our support for stem cell research to leverage an additional $12 billion in private funding for the field.
  • Enrolled more than 2700 patients in CIRM funded clinical trials

In many ways our work is just beginning. We have laid the groundwork, helped enable an extraordinary community of researchers and dramatically accelerated the field. Now we want to get those therapies (and many more) over the finish line and get them approved by the FDA so they can become available to many more people around the state, the country and the world.

We also know that we have to make these therapies available to all people, regardless of their background and ability to pay. We have to ensure that underserved communities, who were often left out of research in the past, are an integral part of this work and are included in every aspect of that research, particularly clinical trials. That’s why we now require anyone applying to us for funding to commit to engaging with underserved communities and to have a written plan to show how they are going to do that.

Over the coming month, you will hear more about some of the remarkable things we have managed to achieve so far and get a better sense of what we hope to do in the future. We know there will be challenges ahead and that not everything we do or support will work. But we also know that with the team we have built at CIRM, the brilliant research community in California and the passion and drive of the patient advocate community we will live up to the responsibility the people of California placed in us when they approved Proposition 14.

You can bank on CIRM

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Way back in 2013, the CIRM Board invested $32 million in a project to create an iPSC Bank. The goal was simple;  to collect tissue samples from people who have different diseases, turn those samples into high quality stem cell lines – the kind known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) – and create a facility where those lines can be stored and distributed to researchers who need them.

Fast forward almost seven years and that idea has now become the largest public iPSC bank in the world. The story of how that happened is the subject of a great article (by CIRM’s Dr. Stephen Lin) in the journal Science Direct.

Dr. Stephen Lin

In 2013 there was a real need for the bank. Scientists around the world were doing important research but many were creating the cells they used for that research in different ways. That made it hard to compare one study to another and come up with any kind of consistent finding. The iPSC Bank was designed to change that by creating one source for high quality cells, collected, processed and stored under a single, consistent method.

Tissue samples – either blood or skin – were collected from thousands of individuals around California. Each donor underwent a thorough consent process – including being shown a detailed brochure – to explain what iPS cells are and how the research would be done.

The diseases to be studied through this bank include:

  • Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD)
  • Alzheimer’s disease
  • Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
  • Cardiomyopathies (heart conditions)
  • Cerebral Palsy
  • Diabetic Retinopathy
  • Epilepsy
  • Fatty Liver diseases
  • Hepatitis C (HCV)
  • Intellectual Disabilities
  • Primary Open Angle Glaucoma
  • Pulmonary Fibrosis

The samples were screened to make sure they were safe – for example the blood was tested for HBV and HIV – and then underwent rigorous quality control testing to make sure they met the highest standards.

Once approved the samples were then turned into iPSCs at a special facility at the Buck Institute in Novato and those lines were then made available to researchers around the world, both for-profit and non-profit entities.

Scientists are now able to use these cells for a wide variety of uses including disease modeling, drug discovery, drug development, and transplant studies in animal research models. It gives them a greater ability to study how a disease develops and progresses and to help discover and test new drugs or other therapies

The Bank, which is now run by FUJIFILM Cellular Dynamics, has become a powerful resource for studying genetic variation between individuals, helping scientists understand how disease and treatment vary in a diverse population. Both CIRM and Fuji Film are committed to making even more improvements and additions to the collection in the future to ensure this is a vital resource for researchers for years to come.

Building the World’s Largest iPSC Repository: An Interview with CIRM’s Stephen Lin

/ Freya Leask / Leave a comment

This blog originally appeared on RegMedNet and was provided by Freya Leask, Editor & Community Manager of RegMedNet. In this interview, Stephen Lin, Senior Science Officer at the California Institute Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), discusses the scope, challenges and potential of CIRM’s iPSC Initiative. 

 

Stephen Lin

Stephen Lin received his PhD from Washington University (MO, USA) and completed his postdoctoral work at Harvard University (MA, USA). Lin is a senior science officer at CIRM which he joined in 2015 to oversee the development of a $32 million repository of iPSCs generated from up to 3000 healthy and diseased individuals and covering both complex and rare diseases. He also oversees a $40 million initiative to apply genomics and bioinformatics approaches to stem cell research and development of therapies. Lin is the program lead on the CIRM Translating Center which focuses on supporting the process development, safety/toxicity studies and manufacturing of stem cell therapy candidates to prepare them for clinical trials. He was previously a scientist at StemCells, Inc (CA, USA) and a staff scientist team lead at Thermo Fisher Scientific (MA, USA).

Q: Please introduce yourself and your institution.

I completed my PhD at Washington University in biochemistry, studying the mechanisms of aging, before doing my postdoc at Harvard, investigating programmed cell death. After that, I went into industry and have been working with stem cells ever since.

I was at the biotech company StemCells, Inc for 6 years where I worked on cell therapeutics. I then joined what was Life Technologies which is now Thermo Fisher Scientific.  I joined CIRM in 2015 as they were launching two new initiatives, the iPSC repository and the genomics initiative, which were a natural combination of my experience in both the stem cells industry and in genetic analysis.  I’ve been here for a year and a half, overseeing both initiatives as well as the CIRM Translating Center.

Q: What prompted the development of the iPSC repository?

Making iPSCs is challenging! It isn’t trivial for many research labs to produce these materials, especially for a wide variety of diseases; hence, the iPSC repository was set up in 2013. In its promotion of stem cells, CIRM had the financial resources to develop a bank for researchers and build up a critical mass of lines to save researchers the trouble of recruiting the patients, getting the consents, making and quality controlling the cells. CIRM wanted to cut that out and bring the resources straight to the research community.

Q: What are the challenges of storage so many iPSCs?

Many of the challenges of storing iPSCs and ensuring their quality are overcome with adequate quality controls at the production step. The main challenge is that we’re collecting samples from up to 3000 donors – the logistics of processing that many tissue samples from 11 funded and nonfunded collectors are difficult. The lines are being produced in the same uniform manner by one agency, Cellular Dynamics International (WI, USA), to ensure quality in terms of pluripotency, karyotyping and sterility testing.

Once the lines are made, they are stored at the Coriell Institute (NJ, USA). During storage, there is a challenge in simply keeping track of and distributing that many samples; we will have approximately 40 vials for each of the 3000 main lines. Both Cellular Dynamics and Coriell have sophisticated tracking systems and Coriell have set up a public catalog website where anyone can go to read about and order the lines. Most collections don’t have this functionality, as the IT infrastructure required for searching and displaying the lines along with clinical information, the ordering process, material transfer agreements and, for commercial uses, the licensing agreements was very complex.

Q: Can anyone use the repository?

Yes, they can! There is a fee to utilize the lines but we encourage researchers anywhere in the world to order them. The lines are mostly for research and academic purposes but the collection was built to be commercialized, all the way from collecting the samples. When the samples were collected, the patient consent included, among other things, banking, distribution, genetic characterization and commercialization.

The lines also have pre-negotiated licensing agreements with iPS Academia Japan (Kyoto, Japan) and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WI, USA). Commercial entities that want to use the cells for drug screening can obtain a license which allows them to use these lines for drug discovery and drug screening purposes without fear of back payment royalties down the road. People often forget during drug screening that the intellectual property to make the iPSCs is still under patent, so if you do discover a drug using iPSCs without taking care of these licensing agreements, your discovery could be liable to ownership by that original intellectual property holder.

Q: Will wider access to high quality iPSCs accelerate discovery?

That’s our hope. When people make iPSCs, the quality can be highly variable depending on the lab’s background and experience, which was another impetus to create the repository. Cellular Dynamics have set up a very robust system to create these lines in a rigorous quality control pipeline to guarantee that these lines are pluripotent and genetically stable.

Q: What diseases could these lines be used to study and treat?

We collected samples from patients with many different diseases – from neurodevelopmental disorders including epilepsy and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, to eye disease and diabetes – as well as the corresponding controls. We also have lines from rare diseases, where the communities have no other tools to study them, for example, ADCY5 related dyskinesia. You can read our recent blogs about our efforts to generate new iPSC lines for ADCY5 and other rare diseases here and here.

Q: What are your plans for the iPSC initiative this year?

We’re currently the largest publicly available repository in the world and we aren’t complete yet. We have just under half of the lines in with the other half still being produced and quality controlled. Something else we want to do is add further information to make the lines more valuable and ensure the drug models are constantly improving. The reason people will want to use iPSCs for human disease modeling is whether they have valuable information associated with them.  For example, we are trying to add genetic and sequencing information to the catalog for lines that have it. This will also allow researchers to prescreen the lines they are interested in to match the diseases and drugs they are studying.

Q: Does the future for iPSCs lie in being utilized as tools to find therapeutics as opposed to therapeutics themselves?

I think the future is two pronged. There is certainly a future for disease modeling and drug screening. There is currently an initiative within the FDA, the CiPA initiative, is designed to replace current paradigms for drug safety testing with computational model and stem cell models. In particular, they hope to be able to screen drugs for cardiotoxicity in stem cells before they go to patients.  Mouse and rodent models have different receptors and ion channels so these cardiotoxic effects aren’t usually seen until clinical trials.

The other avenue is in therapeutics. However, this will come later in the game because the lines being used for research often can’t be used for therapeutics. Patient consent for therapeutic use has to be obtained at sample collection, the tissue should be handled in compliance with good lab practice and the lines must be produced following good manufacturing process (GMP) guidelines. They must then be characterized to ensure they have met all safety protocols for iPSC therapeutics.

There is already a second trial being initiated in Japan of an iPSC therapeutic to treat macular degeneration, utilizing allogenic lines that are human leukocyte antigen-compatible and extensively safety profiled. Companies such as Lonza (Basel, Switzerland) and Cellular Dynamics are starting to produce their own GMP lines, and CIRM is funding some translation programs where clinical grade iPSCs are being produced for therapeutics.

Further Reading

Has the promise of stem cells been overstated?

/ Karen Ring / 2 Comments

One of the most famous stem cell scientists in the world said on Monday that the promise of stem cell treatments has in some ways been overstated.

In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, one of the recipients of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), said, “we can help just a small portion of patients by stem cell therapy.”

Shinya Yamanaka. (Image source: Ko Sasaki, New York Times)

Shinya Yamanaka. (Image source: Ko Sasaki, New York Times)

He explained that there are only 10 target diseases that he believes will benefit directly from stem cell therapies including, “Parkinson’s, retinal and corneal diseases, heart and liver failure, diabetes, spinal cord injury, joint disorders and some blood disorders. But maybe that’s all. The number of human diseases is enormous.”

This is a big statement coming from a key opinion leader in the field of stem cell research, and it’s likely to spur a larger conversation on the future of stem cell treatments.

Yamanaka also touched on another major point in his interview – progress takes time.

In the ten years since his discovery of iPS cells, he and other scientists have learned the hard way that the development of stem cell treatments can be time consuming. While autologous iPS cell treatments (making stem cell lines from a patient and transplanting them back into that patient) have entered clinical trials to treat patients with macular degeneration, a disease that causes blindness, the trials have been put on hold until the safety of the stem cell lines being used are confirmed.

At the World Alliance Forum in November, Yamanaka revealed that generating a single patient iPS cell line can cost up to one million dollars which isn’t feasible for the 1000’s of patients who need them. He admitted that the fate of personalized stem cell medicine, which once seemed so promising, now seems unrealistic because it’s time consuming and costly.

But with any obstacle, there is always a path around it. Under Yamanaka’s guidance, Japan is generating donor iPS cell lines that can be used to treat a large portion of the Japanese population. Yamanaka said that 100 lines would cover 100 million people in Japan and that 200 lines would be enough to cover the US population. iPS cell banks are being generated around the world, meaning that one day the millions of people suffering from the target diseases Yamanaka mentioned could be treated or even cured. Would this not fulfill a promise that was made about the potential of stem cell treatments?

Which brings me to my point, I don’t believe the promise of stem cells has been overstated. I think that it has yet to be realized, and it will take more research and more time to get there. As a community, we need to be understanding, patient, and supportive.

In my opinion (as a scientist aside from my role at CIRM), I believe that Yamanaka’s interview failed to reveal his optimism about the future of stem cell treatments. What I took from Yamanaka’s comments is that stem cell treatments can help a small number of patients with specific diseases right now. That’s not to say that stem cell research won’t produce promising treatments for other diseases in the future.

Retinal diseases and blood disorders are easier to target with stem cell treatments because only one type of cell needs to be replaced. It makes sense to tackle those diseases first and make sure that these stem cell treatments are effective and safe in patients before we focus on more complicated diseases where multiple cell types or organs are involved.

Part of the reason why scientists are unsure whether stem cell treatments can treat complex diseases is because we still don’t know the details of what causes these diseases. After we know more about what’s going wrong, including all the cell types and molecules involved, research might reveal new ways that stem cells could be used to help treat those diseases. Or on the other hand, stem cells could be used to model those diseases to help discover new drug treatments.

I’ve heard Yamanaka talk many times and recently I heard him speak at the World Alliance Forum in November, where he said that the two biggest hurdles we are facing for stem cell treatments to be successful is time and cost. After we overcome these hurdles, his outlook was optimistic that stem cell treatments could improve people’s lives. But he stressed that these advances will take time.

He shared a similar sentiment at the very end of the NY Times interview by referencing his father’s story and the decades it took to cure hepatitis C,

“You know, my father had a small factory. He injured his leg in the factory when I was in junior high. He had a transfusion, and he got hepatitis C. He passed away in 1989. Twenty-five years later, just two years ago, scientists developed a very effective cure. We now have a tablet. Three months and the virus is gone — it’s amazing. But it took 25 years. iPS cells are only 10 years old. The research takes time. That’s what everybody needs to understand.”

Yamanaka says more time is needed for stem cell treatments to become effective cures, but CIRM has already witnessed success. In our December Board meeting, we heard from two patients who were cured of genetic blood diseases by stem cell treatments that CIRM funded. One of them was diagnosed with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) and the other had chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). Both had their blood stem cells genetically engineered to removed disease-causing mutations and then transplanted back into their body to create a healthy immune system and cure them of their disease.

Hearing how grateful these patients and their families were to receive life-saving stem cell treatments and how this research brings new hope to other patients suffering from the same diseases, in my mind, fulfills the promise of stem cell research and makes funding stem cell treatments worth it.

I believe we will hear more and more of these success stories in the next decade and CIRM will most certainly play an important role in this future. There are others in the field who share a similar optimism for the future of stem cell treatments. Hank Greely, the Director for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, said in an interview with the Sacramento Bee about the future of CIRM,

Hank Greely, Stanford University

Hank Greely, Stanford University

“The next few years should determine just how good California’s investment has been. It is encouraging to see CIRM supporting so many clinical trials; it will be much more exciting when – and I do expect ‘when’ and not ‘if’ – one of those trials leads to an approved treatment.”

 

Related Links:

Meeting the scientists who are turning their daughter’s cells into a research tool – one that could change her life forever

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

There’s nothing like a face-to-face meeting to really get to know someone. And when the life of someone you love is in the hands of that person, then it’s a meeting that comes packed with emotion and importance.

lilly-grossman

Lilly Grossman

Last week Gay and Steve Grossman got to meet the people who are working with their daughter Lilly’s stem cells. Lilly was born with a rare, debilitating condition called ADCY5-related dyskinesia. It’s an abnormal involuntary movement disorder caused by a genetic mutation that results in muscle weakness and severe pain. Because it is so rare, little research has been done on developing a deeper understanding of it, and even less on developing treatments.

buck-team

The Grossmans and Chris Waters meet the Buck team

 

That’s about to change. CIRM’s Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell  iPSC Bank – at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging – is now home to some of Lilly’s cells, and these are being turned into iPS cells for researchers to study the disease, and to hopefully develop and test new drugs or other therapies.

Gay said that meeting the people who are turning Lilly’s tissue sample into a research tool was wonderful:

“I think meeting the people who are doing the actual work at the lab is so imperative, and so important. I want them to see where their work is going and how they are not only affecting our lives and our daughter’s life but also the lives of the other kids who are affected by this rare disease and all rare diseases.”

Joining them for the trip to the Buck was Chris Waters, the driving force behind getting the Bank to accept new cell lines. Chris runs Rare Science a non-profit organization that focuses on children with rare diseases by partnering with patient family communities and foundations.

chris-gay-steve1

Steve and Gay Grossman and Chris Waters

In a news release, Chris says there are currently 7,000 identified rare diseases and 50 percent of those affect children; tragically 30 percent of those children die before their 5th birthday:

“The biggest gap in drug development is that we are not addressing the specific needs of children, especially those with rare diseases.  We need to focus on kids. They are our future. If it takes 14 years and $2 billion to get FDA approval for a new drug, how is that going to address the urgent need for a solution for the millions of children across the world with a rare disease? That’s why we created Rare Science. How do we help kids right now, how do we help the families? How do we make change?”

Jonathan Thomas, the Chair of the CIRM Board, said one way to help these families and drive change is by adding samples of stem cells from rare diseases like ADCY5 to the iPSC Bank:

“Just knowing the gene that causes a particular problem is only the beginning. By having the iPSCs of individuals, we can start to investigate the diseases of these kids in the labs. Deciphering the biology of why there are similarities and dissimilarities between these children could the open the door for life changing therapies.”

When CIRM launched the iPSC Initiative – working with CDI, Coriell, the Buck Institute and researchers around California – the goal was to build the largest iPSC Bank in the world.  Adding new lines, such as the cells from people with ADCY5, means the collection will be even more diverse than originally planned.

Chris hopes this action will serve as a model for other rare diseases, creating stem cell lines from them to help close the gap between discovery research and clinical impact. And she says seeing the people who are turning her idea into reality is just amazing:

“Oh my gosh. It’s just great to be here, to see all these people who are making this happen, they’re great. And I think they benefit too, by being able to put a human face on the diseases they are working on. I think you learn so much by meeting the patients and their families because they are the ones who are living with this every day. And by understanding it through their eyes, you can improve your research exponentially. It just makes so much more sense.”

bears

RARE Bears for RARE Science

To help raise funds for this work Rare Science is holding a special auction, starting tomorrow, of RARE Bears. These are bears that have been hand made by, and this is a real thing, “celebrity quilters”, so you know the quality is going to be amazing. All proceeds from the auction go to help RARE Science accelerate the search for treatments for the 200 million kids around the world who are undiagnosed or who have a rare disease.

 

Making a deposit in the Bank: using stem cells from children with rare diseases to find new treatments

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Part of The Stem Cellar series on ten years of iPS cells

chris-waters-580-by-388

For Chris Waters, the motivation behind her move from big pharmaceutical companies and biotech to starting a non-profit organization focused on rare diseases in children is simple: “What’s most important is empowering patient families and helping them accelerate research to the clinical solutions they so urgently need for their child ,” she says.

Chris is the founder of Rare Science. Their mission statement – Accelerating Cures for RARE Kids – bears a striking resemblance to ours here at CIRM, so creating a partnership between us just seemed to make sense. At least it did to Chris. And one thing you need to know about Chris, is that when she has an idea you should just get out of the way, because she is going to make it happen.

“The biggest gap in drug development is that we are not addressing the specific needs of children, especially those with rare diseases.  We need to focus on kids. They are our future. If it takes 14 years and $2 billion to get FDA approval for a new drug, how is that going to help the 35% of the 200 million children across the world that are dying before 5 years of age because they have a rare disease? That’s why we created Rare Science. How do we help kids right now, how do we help the families? How do we make change?”

Banking on CIRM for help

One of the changes she wanted to make was to add the blood and tissue samples from one of the rare disease patient communities she works with to the CIRM Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Bank. This program is collecting samples from up to 3,000 Californians – some of them healthy, some suffering from diseases such as autism, Alzheimer’s, heart, lung and liver disease and blindness. The samples will be turned into iPS cells – pluripotent stem cells that have the ability to be turned into any other type of cell in the body – enabling researchers to study how the diseases progress, and hopefully leading to the development of new therapies.

 

lilly-grossman

Lilly Grossman: photo courtesy LA Times

Chris says many kids with rare diseases can struggle for years to get an accurate diagnosis and even when they do get one there is often nothing available to help them. She says one San Diego teenager, Lilly Grossman, was originally diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy and it took years to identify that the real cause of her problems was a mutation in a gene called ADCY5, leading to abnormal involuntary movement. At first Lily’s family felt they were the only ones facing this problem. They have since started a patient family organization (ADCY5.org) that supports others with this condition.

“Even though we know that the affected individuals have the gene mutation, we have no idea how the gene causes the observable traits that are widely variable across the individuals we know.  We need research tools to help us understand the biology of ADCY5 and other rare disease – it is not enough to just know the gene mutation. We always wanted to do a stem cell line that would help us get at these biological questions.”

Getting creative

But with little money to spend Chris faced what, for an ordinary person, might have been a series of daunting obstacles. She needed consent forms so that everyone donating tissue, particularly the children, knew exactly what was involved in giving samples and how those samples would be used in research.  She also needed materials to collect the samples. In addition she needed to find doctors and sites around the world where the families were located to help with the sample collection.  All of this was going to cost money, which for any non-profit is always in short supply.

So she went to work herself, creating a Research Participant’s Bill of Rights – a list of the rights that anyone taking part in medical research has. She developed forms explaining to children, teenagers and parents what happens if they give skin or blood samples as part of medical research, telling them how an individual’s personal medical health history may be used in research studies. And then she turned to medical supply companies and got them to donate the tubes and other materials that would be needed to collect and preserve the tissue and blood samples.

Even though ADCY5 is a very rare condition, Chris has collected samples from 42 individuals representing 13 different families, some affected with the condition as well as their unaffected siblings and parents. These samples come from families all around the world, from the US and Europe, to Canada and Australia.

“With CIRM we can build stem cell lines. We can lower the barrier of access for researchers who want to utilize these valuable stem cell lines that they may not have the resources to generate themselves.  The cell lines, in the hands of researchers, can potentially accelerate understanding of the biology. They can help us identify targets to focus on for therapies. They can help us screen currently approved medications or drugs, so we have something now that could help these kids now, not 14 years from now.”

The samples Chris collects will be made available to researchers not just here in the US, but around the world. Chris hopes this program will serve as a model for other rare diseases, creating stem cell lines from them to help close the gap between discovery research and clinical impact.

Rare bears for rare disease

But in everything she does, in the end it always comes down to the patient families. Chris says so many children and families battling a rare disease feel they are alone. So she created with her team, the RARE Bear program to let them know they aren’t alone, that they are part of a worldwide community of support. She says each bear is handmade by the RARE Bear Army which spans 9 countries including 45 states in the US.  Each RARE Bear is different, because “they are all one of a kind bears for one of a kind kids. And that’s why we are here, to help rare kids one bear at a time.”  The RARE Bear program, also helps with rare disease awareness, patient outreach and rare disease community building which is key for RARE Science Research Programs.

It’s working. Chris recently got this series of photos and notes from the parents of a young girl in England, after they got their bear.

“I wanted to say a huge heartfelt thank you for my daughters Rare bear. It arrived today to Essex, England & as you can see from my pictures Isabella loves her already! We have named her Faith as a reminder to never give up!”

The Stem Cell Bank is open for business

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Creating a stem cell bank

Creating a stem cell bank

When you go to a bank and withdraw money you know that the notes you get are all going to look the same and do the same job, namely allow you to buy things. But when you get stem cells for research that’s not necessarily the case. Stem cells bought from different laboratories don’t always look exactly the same or perform the same in research studies.

That’s why CIRM has teamed up with the Coriell Institute and Cellular Dynamics International (CDI) to open what will be the world’s largest publically available stem cell bank. It officially opened today. In September the Bank will have 300 cell lines available for purchase but plans to increase that to 750 by February 2016.

300 lines but no waiting

Now, even if you are not in the market for stem cells this bank could have a big impact on your life because it creates an invaluable resource for researchers looking into the causes of, and potential therapies for, 11 different diseases including autism, epilepsy and other childhood neurological disorders, blinding eye diseases, heart, lung and liver diseases, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The goal of the Bank – which is located at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California – is to collect blood or tissue samples from up to 3,000 volunteer donors. Some of those donors have particular disorders – such as Alzheimer’s – and some are healthy. Those samples will then be turned into high quality iPSCs or induced pluripotent stem cells.

Now, iPSC lines are particularly useful for research because they can be turned into any type of cell in the body such as a brain cell or liver cell. And, because the cells are genetically identical to the people who donated the samples scientists can use the cells to determine how, for example, a brain cell from someone with autism differs from a normal brain cell. That can enable them to study how diseases develop and progress, and also to test new drugs or treatments against defects observed in those cells to see which, if any, might offer some benefits.

Power of iPSCs

In a news release Kaz Hirao, Chairman and CEO of CDI, says these could be game changers:

“iPSCs are proving to be powerful tools for disease modeling, drug discovery and the development of cell therapies, capturing human disease and individual genetic variability in ways that are not possible with other cellular models.”

Equally important is that researchers in different parts of the world will be able to compare their findings because they are using the same cell lines. Right now many researchers use cell lines from different sources so even though they are theoretically the same type of tissue, in practice they often produce very different results.

Improving consistency

CIRM Board Chair, Jonathan Thomas, said he hopes the Bank will lead to greater consistency in results.

“We believe the Bank will be an extraordinarily important resource in helping advance the use of stem cell tools for the study of diseases and finding new ways to treat them. While many stem cell efforts in the past have provided badly needed new tools for studying rare genetic diseases, this Bank represents both rare and common diseases that afflict many Californians. Stem cell technology offers a critical new approach toward developing new treatments and cures for those diseases as well.”

Most banks are focused on enriching your monetary account. This bank hopes to enrich people’s lives, by providing the research tools needed to unlock the secrets of different diseases, and pave the way for new treatments.

For more information on how to buy a cell line go to http://catalog.coriell.org/CIRM or email CIRM@Coriell.org