patients

Stem Cell Agency celebrates 50 clinical trials with patient #1

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Yesterday the CIRM Board approved funding for our 50th clinical trial (you can read about that here) It was an historic moment for us and to celebrate we decided to go back in history and hear from the very first person to be treated in a CIRM-funded clinical trial. Rich Lajara was treated in the Geron clinical trial after experiencing a spinal cord injury, thus he became CIRM’s patient #1. It’s a badge he says he is honored to wear. This is the speech Rich made to our Board.

Rich Lajara

Hello and good afternoon everyone. It’s an honor to be here today as the 50th clinical trial has been officially funded by CIRM. It was feels like it was just yesterday that I was enrolled into the first funded clinical trial by CIRM and in turn became California’s’ 1st embryonic stem cell patient.

I became paralyzed from the waist down in September 2011. It was Labor Day and I was at a river with some close friends. There was this natural granite rock slide feature next to a waterfall, it was about 60 feet long; all you had to do was get a bucket of water to get the rocks wet and slide down into a natural pool. I ended up slipping and went down head first backwards but was too far over and I slid off a 15’ ledge where the waterfall was. I was pulled from the water and banged up pretty bad. Someone said “look at that deformity on his back” and tapped my leg and asked if I could feel that. I knew immediately I was paralyzed. I thought this was the end, little did I know this was just the beginning. I call it being in the wrong place at the right time.

So, after a few days in the hospital of course everyone, as well as myself, wanted a cure. We quickly learned one didn’t exist. A close family friend had been making phone calls and was able to connect with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation and learned about a clinical trial with “stem cells”. One of my biggest question was how any people have done this? “Close to none”, I was told.

I was also told I most likely would have no direct benefit as this was a safety trial? So why do it at all? Obviously at that time I was willing to overlook the “most likely” part because I was willing to do anything to try and get my normal life back.

Looking back the big picture was laying the ground work for others like Kris or Jake (two people enrolled in a later version of this trial). At the time I had no clue that what I was doing would be such a big deal. The data collected from me would end up being priceless. It’s stories like Jake’s and Kris’ that make me proud and reinforce my decision to have participated in California’s first stem cell clinical trial funded by prop 71.

Like I said earlier it was just the beginning for me. A couple of years later I became a patient advocate working with Americans for Cures. I have been able to meet many people in the stem cell industry and love to see the glow in their face when they learn I was California’s first embryonic stem cell patient.

I can’t even fathom all the year’s of hard work and countless hours of research that had lead up to my long anticipated surgery, but when I see their glowing smile I know they knew what it took.

I also enjoy sharing my story and bridging the gap between myths and facts about stem cells, or talking to students and helping inspire the next generation that will be in the stem cell industry.  As a matter of fact, I have 13 year old sister, Maddie, dead set on being a neurosurgeon.

Fast forward to today. Life in a wheelchair is not exactly a roll in the park (no pun intended) but I have grown accustomed to the new normal. Aside from some neuropathic pain, life is back on track.

Not once did I feel sorry for myself, I was excited to be alive. Sure I have bad days but don’t we all.

In the last 14 years CIRM has funded 50 human clinical trials, published around 2750 new peer-reviewed scientific discoveries, and they’ve transformed California into the world leader in stem cell research. As I look around the posters on the wall, of the people whose lives have been transformed by the agency, I can’t help but be struck by just how much has been achieved in such a short period of time.

While my journey might not yet be over, Evie and 40 other children like her, (children born with SCID) will never remember what it was like to live with the horrible condition they were born with because they have been cured thanks to CIRM. There are hundreds of others whose lives have been transformed because of work the agency has funded.

CIRM has proven how much can be achieved if we invest in cutting-edge medical research.

As most of you here probably know CIRM’s funding from Proposition 71 is about to run out. If I had just one message I wanted people to leave with today it would be this. Everyone in this room knows how much CIRM has done in a little over a decade and how many lives have been changed because of its existence. We have the responsibility to make sure this work continues. We have a responsibility to make sure that the stories we’ve heard today are just the beginning.

I will do everything I can to make sure the agency gets refunded and I hope that all of you will join me in that fight. I’m excited for the world of stem cells, particularly in California, and can’t wait to see what’s on the horizon.

 

Getting faster, working smarter: how changing the way we work is paying big dividends

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

This blog is part of the Month of CIRM series

Speeding up the way you do things isn’t always a good idea. Just ask someone who got a ticket for going 65mph in a 30mph zone. But at CIRM we have found that doing things at an accelerated pace is paying off in a big way.

When CIRM started back in 2004 we were, in many ways, a unique organization. That meant we pretty much had to build everything from scratch, creating our own ways of asking for applications, reviewing those applications, funding them etc. Fast forward ten years and it was clear that, as good a job as we did in those early days, there was room for improvement in the way we operated.

So we made some changes. Big changes.

We adopted as our mantra the phrase “operational excellence.” It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue but it does reflect what we were aiming for. The Business Dictionary defines operational excellence as:

 “A philosophy of the workplace where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results in the ongoing improvement in an organization.”

We didn’t want to just tinker with the way we worked, we wanted to reinvent every aspect of our operation. To do that we involved everyone in the operation. We held a series of meetings where everyone at CIRM, and I do mean everyone, was invited to join in and offer their ideas on how to improve our operation.

CIRM2.0_Logo

The end result was CIRM 2.0. At the time we described it as “a radical overhaul” of the way we worked. That might have been an understatement. We increased the speed, frequency and volume of the programs we offered, making it easier and more predictable for researchers to apply to us for funding, and faster for them to get that funding if they were approved.

For example, before 2.0 it took almost two years to go from applying for funding for a clinical trial to actually getting that funding. Today it takes around 120 days.

But it’s not just about speed. It’s also about working smarter. In the past if a researcher’s application for funding for a clinical trial failed it could be another 12 months before they got a chance to apply again. With many diseases 12 months could be a death sentence. So we changed the rules. Now if you have a project ready for a clinical trial you can apply any time. And instead of recommending or not recommending a project, basically voting it up or down, our independent panel of expert reviewers now give researchers with good but not great applications constructive feedback, enabling the researchers to make the changes needed to improve their project, and reapply for funding within 30 days.

This has not only increased the number of applications for clinical trials, it has also increased the quality of those applications.

We made similar changes in our Discovery and Translation programs. Increasing the frequency of each award, making it easier for researchers to know when the next round of funding was coming up. And we added incentives to encourage researchers to move successful projects on to the next level. We wanted to create a pipeline of the most promising projects steadily moving towards the clinic.

The motivation to do this comes from our patients. At CIRM we are in the time business. Many of the patients who are looking to stem cells to help them don’t have the luxury of time; they are rapidly running out of it. So we have a responsibility to do all we can to reduce the amount of time it takes to get the most promising therapies to them, without in any way compromising safety and jeopardizing their health.

By the end of 2016 those changes were very clearly paying dividends as we increased the frequency of reviews and the number of projects we reviewed but at the same time decreased the amount of time it took us to do all that.

Slide1

But we are not done yet. We have done a good job of improving the way we work. But there is always room to be even better, to go even faster and be more efficient.

We are not done accelerating. Not by a long shot.

The Alpha Stem Cell Clinics: Innovation for Breakthrough Stem Cell Treatments

/ Geoffrey Lomax Dr. PH / Leave a comment

During this third week of the Month of CIRM, we are focusing on CIRM’s Infrastructure programs which are all focused on helping to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.

So here is the question of the day: What is the world’s largest network of medical centers dedicated to providing stem cell treatments to patients?

The answer is the CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network.

The CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinics Network consists of leading medical institutions throughout California.

The ASCC Network consists of six leading medical centers throughout California. In 2015, the Network was launched in southern California at the City of Hope, UC Irvine, UC Los Angeles, and UC San Diego. In September 2017, CIRM awarded funding to UC Davis and UC San Francisco to enable the Network to better serve patients throughout the state. Forty stem cell clinical trials have been conducted within the Network with hundreds of patients being treat for a variety of conditions, including:

  • Cancers of the blood, brain, lung and other sites
  • Organ diseases of the heart and kidney
  • Pediatric diseases
  • Traumatic injury to the brain and spine

A complete list of clinical trials may be found on our website.

The Alpha Clinics at UC Los Angeles and San Francisco are working collaboratively on breakthrough treatments for serious childhood diseases. This video highlights a CIRM-funded clinical trial at the UCLA Alpha Clinic that is designed to restore the immune system of patients with life-threatening immune deficiencies. A similar breakthrough treatment is also being used at the UCLA Alpha Clinic to treat sickle cell disease. A video describing this treatment is below.

Why do we need a specialized Network for stem cell clinical trials?

Stem cell treatments are unique in many ways. First, they consist of cells or cell products that frequently require specialized processing. For example, the breakthrough treatments for children, described above, requires the bone marrow to be genetically modified to correct defects. This “gene therapy” is performed in the Alpha Clinic laboratories, which are specifically designed to implement cutting edge gene therapy techniques on the patient’s stem cells.

Many of the cancer clinical trials also take the patient’s own cells and then process them in a laboratory. This processing is designed to enhance the patient’s ability to fight cancer using their own immune cells. Each Alpha Clinic has specialized laboratories to process cells, and the sites at City of Hope and UC Davis have world-class facilities for stem cell manufacturing. The City of Hope and Davis facilities produce high quality therapeutic products for commercial and academic clinical trial sponsors. Because of this ability, the Network has become a prime location internationally for clinical trials requiring processing and manufacturing services.

Another unique feature of the Network is its partnership with CIRM, whose mission is to accelerate stem cell treatments for patients with unmet medical needs. Often, this means developing treatments for rare diseases in which the patient population is comparatively small. For example, there about 40-100 immune deficient children born each year in the United States. We are funding clinical trials to help treat those children. The Network is also treating rare brain and blood cancers.

To find patients that may benefit from these treatments, the Network has developed the capacity to confidentially query over 20 million California patient records. If a good match is found, there is a procedure in place, that is reviewed by an ethics committee, where the patient’s doctor can be notified of the trial and pass that information to the patient. For patients that are interested in learning more, each Alpha Clinic has a Patient Care Coordinator with the job of coordinating the process of educating patients about the trial and assisting them if they choose to participate.

How Can I Learn More?

If you are a patient or a family member and would like to learn more about the CIRM Alpha Clinics, click here. There is contact information for each clinic so you can learn more about specific trials, or you can visit our Alpha Clinics Trials page for a complete list of trials ongoing in the Network.

If you are a patient or a trial sponsor interested in learning more about the services offered through our Alpha Clinics Network, visit our website.

Treatments, cures and clinical trials: an in-person update on CIRM’s progress

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Patients and Patient Advocates are at the heart of everything we do at CIRM. That’s why we are holding three free public events in the next few months focused on updating you on the stem cell research we are funding, and our plans for the future.

Right now we have 33 projects that we have funded in clinical trials. Those range from heart disease and stroke, to cancer, diabetes, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), two different forms of vision loss, spinal cord injury and HIV/AIDS. We have also helped cure dozens of children battling deadly immune disorders. But as far as we are concerned we are only just getting started.

Over the course of the next few years, we have a goal of adding dozens more clinical trials to that list, and creating a pipeline of promising therapies for a wide range of diseases and disorders.

That’s why we are holding these free public events – something we try and do every year. We want to let you know what we are doing, what we are funding, how that research is progressing, and to get your thoughts on how we can improve, what else we can do to help meet the needs of the Patient Advocate community. Your voice is important in helping shape everything we do.

The first event is at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco on Wednesday, September 6th from noon till 1pm. The doors open at 11am for registration and a light lunch.

Gladstone Institutes

Here’s a link to an Eventbrite page that has all the information about the event, including how you can RSVP to let us know you are coming.

We are fortunate to be joined by two great scientists, and speakers – as well as being CIRM grantees-  from the Gladstone Institutes, Dr. Deepak Srivastava and Dr. Steve Finkbeiner.

Dr. Srivastava is working on regenerating heart muscle after it has been damaged. This research could not only help people recover from a heart attack, but the same principles might also enable us to regenerate other organs damaged by disease. Dr. Finkbeiner is a pioneer in diseases of the brain and has done ground breaking work in both Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease.

We have two other free public events coming up in October. The first is at UC Davis in Sacramento on October 10th (noon till 1pm) and the second at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles on October 30th (noon till 1pm). We will have more details on these events in the coming weeks.

We look forward to seeing you at one of these events and please feel free to share this information with anyone you think might be interested in attending.

FDA creates a forum for patients to guide its decision making

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

FDA

It’s not hard to find people who don’t like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the government agency that, among other things, regulates medical therapies. In fact, if you type “do people like the FDA?” into an internet search engine you’ll quickly find out that for a lot of people the answer is “no”.

But the Agency is trying to change and deserves credit for taking seriously many of the criticisms that have been levelled at it over the years and trying to address them.

The latest example is the news that the FDA has set a date for the first-ever meeting of its first-ever Patient Engagement Advisory Committee (PEAC). On its website, the FDA says the PEAC will be focused on patient-related issues:

“The PEAC is a forum for the voice of patients. It will be asked to advise on complex issues related to medical devices and their impact on patients. The goal of PEAC is to better understand and integrate patient perspectives into our oversight, to improve communications with patients about benefits, risks, and clinical outcomes related to medical devices, and to identify new approaches, unforeseen risks or barriers, and unintended consequences from the use of medical devices.”

In the past, the FDA has created forums to allow patients to talk about the impact of a disease on their daily life and their views on treatment options. But those were considered by many to be little more than window dressing, providing a sounding boards for patients but not actually producing any tangible benefits or changes.

The FDA also has patient representatives who take part in FDA advisory committee meetings, but the PEAC is the first time it has ever had a committee that was solely focused on patients and their needs. The nine core members of the PEAC all have experience either as patients or patient advocates and care-givers for patients. A really encouraging sign.

We tip our CAP to the FDA

At CIRM we support anything that ensures that patients not only have a seat at the table, but also that their voices are heard and taken seriously. That’s why for every clinical trial we fund (and even some pre-clinical projects too) we create what we call a Clinical Advisory Panel or CAP (we do love our acronyms).

Each CAP consists of three to five members, with a minimum of one Patient Representative, one External Advisor and one CIRM Science Officer. The purpose of the CAP is to make recommendations and provide guidance and advice to the Project Team running the trial.

Having a Patient Representative on a CAP ensures the patient’s perspective is included in shaping the design of the clinical trial, making sure that the trial is being carried out in a way that has the patient at the center. Patients can ask questions or raise issues that researchers might not think about, and can help the researchers not only do a better job of recruiting the patients they need for the trial, but also keeping those patients involved. We believe a trial designed around the patient, and with the patient in mind, is much more likely to be successful.

In announcing the formation of the PEAC the FDA said:

“Patients are at the heart of what we do. It makes sense to establish an advisory committee built just for them.”

I completely agree.

My only regret is that they didn’t call it the Patient Engagement Advisory Committee for Health, because then the acronym would have been PEACH. And this is certainly a peach of an idea, one worthy of support.

Related Links:

 

 

 

Texas tries to go it alone in offering unproven stem cell therapies to patients

/ Kevin McCormack / 5 Comments

Texas Capitol. (Shutterstock)

One of the most hotly debated topics in stem cell research is whether patients should be able to have easier access to unproven therapies using their own stem cells, at their own risk, and their own cost. It’s a debate that is dividing patients and physicians, researchers and lawmakers.

In California, a bill working its way through the state legislature wants to have warning signs posted in clinics offering unproven stem cell therapies, letting patients know they are potentially putting themselves at risk.

Texas is taking a very different approach. A series of bills under consideration would make it easier for clinics to offer unproven treatments; make it easier for patients with chronic illnesses to use the “right to try” law to take part in early-stage clinical trials (in the past, it was only patients with a terminal illness who could do that); and allow these clinics to charge patients for these unproven stem cell therapies.

Not surprisingly, the Texas bills are attracting some widely divergent views. Many stem cell researchers and some patient advocates are opposed to them, saying they prey on the needs of vulnerable people, offering them treatments – often costing thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars – that have little or no chance of success.

In an article on STATnews, Sean Morrison, a stem cell researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas, said the Texas bills would be bad for patients:

“When patients get desperate, they have a capacity to suspend disbelief. When offered the opportunity of a therapy they believe in, even without data and if the chances of benefit are low, they’ll fight for access to that therapy. The problem is there are fraudulent stem cell clinics that have sprung up to exploit that.”

Patients like Jennifer Ziegler disagree with that completely. Ziegler has multiple sclerosis and has undergone three separate stem cell treatments – two in the US and one in Panama – to help treat her condition. She is also a founding member of Patients For Stem Cells (PFSC):

Jennifer Ziegler

“PFSC does not believe our cells are drugs. We consider the lack of access to adult stem cells an overreach by the federal government into our medical freedoms. My cells are not mass produced, and they do not cross state lines. An adult stem cell treatment is a medical procedure, between me, a fully educated patient, and my fully competent doctor.”

The issue is further complicated because the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – which has regulatory authority over stem cell treatments – considers the kinds of therapies these clinics offer to be a technical violation of the law. So even if Texas passes these three bills, they could still be in violation of federal law. However, a recent study in Cell Stem Cell showed that there are some 570 clinics around the US offering these unproven therapies, and to date the FDA has shown little inclination to enforce the law and shut those clinics down.

UC Davis stem cell researcher – and CIRM grantee – Paul Knoepfler is one of the co-authors of the study detailing how many clinics there are in the US. On his blog – The Niche – he recently expressed grave concerns about the Texas bills:

Paul Knoepfler

“The Texas Legislature is considering three risky bills that would give free rein to stem cell clinics to profit big time off of patients by selling unproven and unapproved “stem cell treatments” that have little if any science behind them. I call one of these bills “Right to Profit” for clinics, which if these became law could get millions from vulnerable patients and potentially block patient rights.”

Ziegler counters that patients have the right to try and save their own lives, saying if the Texas bills pass: “chronically ill, no option patients in the US, will have the opportunity to seek treatment without having to leave the country.”

It’s a debate we are all too familiar with at CIRM. Every day we get emails and phone calls from people asking for help in finding a treatment, for them or a loved one, suffering from a life-threatening or life-altering disease or disorder. It’s incredibly difficult having to tell them there is nothing that would help them currently being tested in a clinical trial.

Inevitably they ask about treatments they have seen online, offered by clinics using the patient’s own stem cells to treat them. At that point, it is no longer an academic debate about proven or unproven therapies, it has become personal; one person asking another for help, to find something, anything, to save their life.

Barring a dramatic change of policy at the FDA. these clinics are not going to go away. Nor will the need of patients who have run out of options and are willing to try anything to ease their pain or delay death. We need to find another way, one that brings these clinics into the fold and makes the treatments they offer part of the clinical trial process.

There are no easy answers, no simple solutions. But standing on either side of the divide, saying those on the other side are either “heartless” or “foolish” serves no one, helps no one. We need to figure out another way.

A ‘Call to Action’ for change at the FDA

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

hd

It’s bad enough to have to battle a debilitating and ultimately deadly disease like Huntington’s disease (HD). But it becomes doubly difficult and frustrating when you feel that the best efforts to develop a therapy for HD are running into a brick wall.

That’s how patients and patient advocates working on HD feel as they see the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) throw up what they feel are unnecessary obstacles in the way of promising research.

So the group Help 4HD International has decided to push back, launching an online campaign to get its supporters to pressure the FDA into taking action. Any action.

Posing the question “Does the FDA understand that time is something we simply don’t have?” Help 4HD is urging people to write to the FDA:

“We have heard the FDA say they feel like our loved ones have quality of life at the end stages of HD. We have heard them say people with HD get to live for 20 years after diagnosis. It seems like the FDA doesn’t understand what we are having to live with generation after generation. We have seen HD research die because the researcher couldn’t get an IND (Investigational New Drug, or approval to put a new drug into clinical trials) from the FDA. We have seen trials that should be happening here in the USA move to other countries because of this. We have seen the FDA continue to put up delays and roadblocks. We are lucky to have amazing research going on for HD/JHD (juvenile HD) right now, but what is that research worth if the FDA doesn’t let it go into clinical trials? Drug development is a business and costs millions of dollars. If the FDA continues to refuse INDs, the fear is that companies will stop investing in HD research. This is a fate that we can’t let happen! We need to write to the FDA and let them know our frustrations and also help them understand our disease better.”

The group has drafted a sample letter for people to use or adapt as they see fit. They’ve even provided them with the address to mail the letter to. In short, they are making it as easy as possible to get as many people as possible to write to the FDA and ask for help.

The HD community is certainly not the only one frustrated at the FDA’s  glacial pace of approval of for clinical trials. That frustration is one of many reasons why Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act late last year. That’s also the reason why we started our Stem Cell Champions campaign, to get the FDA to create a more efficient, but no less safe, approval process.

Several of our most active Stem Cell Champions – like Frances Saldana, Judy Roberson and Katie Jackson – are members of the HD Community. Last May several members of the CIRM Team attended the HD-Care Conference, held to raise awareness about the unmet medical needs of this community. We blogged about it here.

While this call to action comes from the HD community it may serve as a template for other organizations and communities. Many have the same frustrations at the slow pace of approval of therapies for clinical trials.

We are hoping the 21st Century Cures Act will lead to the desired changes at the FDA. But until we see proof that’s the case we understand and support the sense of urgency that the HD community has. They don’t have the luxury of time.

 

 

How stem cells are helping change the face of medicine, one pioneering patient at a time

/ Kevin McCormack / 6 Comments

One of the many great pleasures of my job is that I get to meet so many amazing people. I get to know the researchers who are changing the face of medicine, but even more extraordinary are the people who are helping them do it, the patients.

Attacking Cancer

Karl

Karl Trede

It’s humbling to meet people like Karl Trede from San Jose, California. Karl is a quiet, witty, unassuming man who when the need arose didn’t hesitate to put himself forward as a medical pioneer.

Diagnosed with throat cancer in 2006, Karl underwent surgery to remove the tumor. Several years later, his doctors told him it had returned, only this time it had spread to his lungs. They told him there was no effective treatment. But there was something else.

“One day the doctor said we have a new trial we’re going to start, would you be interested? 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.”

Karl was Patient #1 in a clinical trial at Stanford University that was using a novel approach to attack cancer stem cells, which have the ability to evade standard anti-cancer treatments and cause the tumors to regrow. The team identified a protein, called CD47, that sits on the surface of cancer stem cells and helps them evade being gobbled up and destroyed by the patient’s own immune system. They dubbed CD47 the “don’t eat me” signal and created an antibody therapy they hoped would block the signal, leaving the cancer and the cancer stem cells open to attack by the immune system.

The team did pre-clinical testing of the therapy, using mice to see if it was safe. Everything looked hopeful. Even so, this was still the first time it was being tested in a human. Karl said that didn’t bother him.

“It was an experience for me, it was eye opening. I wasn’t real concerned about being the first in a trial never tested in people before. I said we know that there’s no effective treatment for this cancer, it’s not likely but it’s possible that this could be the one and if nothing else, if it doesn’t do anything for me hopefully it does something so they learn for others.”

It’s that kind of selflessness that is typical of so many people who volunteer for clinical trials, particularly Phase 1 trials, where a treatment is often being tried in people for the first time ever. In these trials, the goal is to make sure the approach is safe, so patients are given a relatively small dose of the therapy (cells or drugs) and told ahead of time it may not do any good. They’re also told that there could be some side effects, potentially serious, even life-threatening ones. Still, they don’t hesitate.

Improving vision

Rosie Barrero certainly didn’t hesitate when she got a chance to be part of a clinical trial testing the use of stem cells to help people with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare progressive disease that destroys a person’s vision and ultimately leaves them blind.

Rosalinda Barrero

Rosie Barrero

“I was extremely excited about the clinical trial. I didn’t have any fear or trepidation about it, I would have been happy being #1, and I was #6 and that was fine with me.”

 

Rosie had what are called retinal progenitor cells injected into her eye, part of a treatment developed by Dr. Henry Klassen at the University of California, Irvine. The hope was that those cells would help repair and perhaps even replace the light-sensing cells damaged by the disease.

Following the stem cell treatment, gradually Rosie noticed a difference. It was small things at first, like being able to make out the colors of cups in her kitchen cupboard, or how many trash cans were outside their house.

“I didn’t expect to see so much, I thought it would be minor, and it is minor on paper but it is hard to describe the improvement. It’s visible, it’s visible improvement.”

These are the moments that researchers like Henry Klassen live for, and have worked so tirelessly for. These are the moments that everyone at CIRM dreams of, when the work we have championed, supported and funded shows it is working, shows it is changing people’s lives.

One year ago this month our governing Board approved a new Strategic Plan, a detailed roadmap of where we want to go in the coming years. The plan laid out some pretty ambitious goals, such as funding 50 new clinical trials in the next 5 years, and at our Board meeting next week we’ll report on how well we are doing in terms of hitting those targets.

People like Karl and Rosie help motivate us to keep trying, to keep working as hard as we can, to achieve those goals. And if ever we have a tough day, we just have to remind ourselves of what Rosie said when she realized she could once again see her children.

“Seeing their faces. It’s pretty incredible. I always saw them with my heart so I just adore them, but now I can see them with my eye.”

Related Links:

Stem Cell Experts Discuss the Ethical Implications of Translating iPSCs to the Clinic

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

Part of The Stem Cellar blog series on 10 years of iPSCs.

This year, scientists are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel Prize winning discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These are cells that are very similar biologically to embryonic stem cells and can develop into any cell in the body. iPSCs are very useful in scientific research for disease modeling, drug screening, and for potential cell therapy applications.

However, with any therapy that involves testing in human patients, there are ethical questions that scientists, companies, and policy makers must consider. Yesterday, a panel of stem cell and bioethics experts at the Cell Symposium 10 Years of iPSCs conference in Berkeley discussed the ethical issues surrounding the translation of iPSC research from the lab bench to clinical trials in patients.

The panel included Shinya Yamanaka (Gladstone Institutes), George Daley (Harvard University), Christine Mummery (Leiden University Medical Centre), Lorenz Studer (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Deepak Srivastava (Gladstone Institutes), and Bioethicist Hank Greely (Stanford University).

iPSC Ethics Panel

iPSC Ethics Panel at the 10 Years of iPSCs Conference

Below is a summary of what these experts had to say about questions ranging from the ethics of patient and donor consent, genetic modification of iPSCs, designer organs, and whether patients should pay to participate in clinical trials.

How should we address patient or donor consent regarding iPSC banking?

Multiple institutes including CIRM are developing iPSC banks that store thousands of patient-derived iPSC lines, which scientists can use to study disease and develop new therapies. These important cell lines wouldn’t exist without patients who consent to donate their cells or tissue. The first question posed to the panel was how to regulate the consent process.

Christine Mummery began by emphasizing that it’s essential that companies are able to license patient-derived iPSC lines so they don’t have to go back to the patient and inconvenience them by asking for additional samples to make new cell lines.

George Daley and Hank Greely discussed different options for improving the informed consent process. Daley mentioned that the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) recently updated their informed consent guidelines and now provide adaptable informed consent templates that can be used for obtaining many type of materials for human stem cell research.  Daley also mentioned the move towards standardizing the informed consent process through a single video shared by multiple institutions.

Greely agreed that video could be a powerful way to connect with patients by using talented “explainers” to educate patients. But both Daley and Greely cautioned that it’s essential to make sure that patients understand what they are getting involved in when they donate their tissue.

Greely rounded up the conversation by reminding the audience that patients are giving the research field invaluable information so we should consider giving back in return. While we can’t and shouldn’t promise a cure, we can give back in other ways like recognizing the contributions of specific patients or disease communities.

Greely mentioned the resolution with Henrietta Lack’s family as a good example. For more than 60 years, scientists have used a cancer cell line called HeLa cells that were derived from the cervical cancer cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta never gave consent for her cells to be used and her family had no clue that pieces of Henrietta were being studied around the world until years later.

In 2013, the NIH finally rectified this issue by requiring that researchers ask for permission to access Henrietta’s genomic data and to include the Lacks family in their publication acknowledgements.

Hank Greely, Stanford University

Hank Greely, Stanford University

“The Lacks family are quite proud and pleased that their mother, grandmother and great grandmother is being remembered, that they are consulted on various things,” said Hank Greely. “They aren’t making any direct money out of it but they are taking a great deal of pride in the recognition that their family is getting. I think that returning something to patients is a nice thing, and a human thing.”

What are the ethical issues surrounding genome editing of iPSCs?

The conversation quickly focused on the ongoing CRISPR patent battle between the Broad Institute, MIT and UC Berkeley. For those unfamiliar with the technique, CRISPR is a gene editing technology that allows you to cut and paste DNA at precise locations in the genome. CRISPR has many uses in research, but in the context of iPSCs, scientists are using CRISPR to remove disease-causing mutations in patient iPSCs.

George Daley expressed his worry about a potential fallout if the CRISPR battle goes a certain way. He commented, “It’s deeply concerning when such a fundamentally enabling platform technology could be restricted for future gene editing applications.”

The CRISPR patent battle began in 2012 and millions of dollars in legal fees have been spent since then. Hank Greely said that he can’t understand why the Institutes haven’t settled this case already as the costs will only continue to rise, but that it might not matter how the case turns out in the end:

“My guess is that this isn’t ultimately going to be important because people will quickly figure out ways to invent around the CRISPR/Cas9 technology. People have already done it around the Cas9 part and there will probably be ways to do the same thing for the CRISPR part.”

 Christine Mummery finished off with a final point about the potential risk of trying to correct disease causing mutations in patient iPSCs using CRISPR technology. She noted that it’s possible the correction may not lead to an improvement because of other disease-causing genetic mutations in the cells that the patient and their family are unaware of.

 Should patients or donors be paid for their cells and tissue?

Lorenz Studer said he would support patients being paid for donating samples as long as the payment is reasonable, the consent form is clear, and patients aren’t trying to make money off of the process.

Hank Greely said the big issue is with inducement and whether you are paying enough money to convince people to do something they shouldn’t or wouldn’t want to do. He said this issue comes up mainly around reproductive egg donation but not with obtaining simpler tissue samples like skin biopsies. Egg donors are given money because it’s an invasive procedure, but also because a political decision was made to compensate egg donors. Greely predicts the same thing is unlikely to happen with other cell and tissue types.

Christine Mummery’s opinion was that if a patient’s iPSCs are used by a drug company to produce new successful drugs, the patient should receive some form of compensation. But she said it’s hard to know how much to pay patients, and this question was left unanswered by the panel.

Should patients pay to participate in clinical trials?

George Daley said it’s hard to justify charging patients to participate in a Phase 1 clinical trial where the focus is on testing the safety of a therapy without any guarantee that there will be beneficial outcome to the patient. In this case, charging a patient money could raise their expectations and mislead them into thinking they will benefit from the treatment. It would also be unfair because only patients who can afford to pay would have access to trials. Ultimately, he concluded that making patients pay for an early stage trial would corrupt the informed consent process. However, he did say that there are certain, rare contexts that would be highly regulated where patients could pay to participate in trials in an ethical way.

Lorenz Studer said the issue is very challenging. He knows of patients who want to pay to be in trials for treatments they hope will work, but he also doesn’t think that patients should have to pay to be in early stage trials where their participation helps the progress of the therapy. He said the focus should be on enrolling the right patient groups in clinical trials and making sure patients are properly educated about the trial they are participating.

Thoughts on the ethics behind making designer organs from iPSCs?

Deepak Srivastava said that he thinks about this question all the time in reference to the heart:

Deepak Srivastava, Gladstone Institutes

Deepak Srivastava, Gladstone Institutes

“The heart is basically a pump. When we traditionally thought about whether we could make a human heart, we asked if we could make the same thing with the same shape and design. But in fact, that’s not necessarily the best design – it’s what evolution gave us. What we really need is a pump that’s electrically active. I think going forward, we should remove the constraint of the current design and just think about what would be the best functional structure to do it. But it is definitely messing with nature and what evolution has given us.”

Deepak also said that because every organ is different, different strategies should be used. In the case of the heart, it might be beneficial to convert existing heart tissue into beating heart cells using drugs rather than transplant iPSC-derived heart cells or tissue. For other organs like the pancreas, it is beneficial to transplant stem cell-derived cells. For diabetes, scientists have shown that injecting insulin secreting cells in multiple areas of the body is beneficial to Diabetes patients.

Hank Greely concluded that the big ethical issue of creating stem cell-derived organs is safety. “Biology isn’t the same as design,” Greely said. “It’s really, really complicated. When you put something into a biological organism, the chances that something odd will happen are extremely high. We have to be very careful to avoid making matters worse.”

For more on the 10 years of iPSCs conference, check out the #CSStemCell16 hashtag on twitter.

Full Steam Ahead: First Patient is Dosed in Expanded CIRM Spinal Cord Injury Trial

/ Karen Ring / 2 Comments

Today we bring you more good news about a CIRM-funded clinical trial for spinal cord injury that’s received a lot of attention lately in the news. Asterias Biotherapeutics has treated its first patient in an expanded patient population of spinal cord injury patients who suffer from cervical, or neck, injuries.

In late August, Asterias reported that they had passed the first hurdle in their Phase 1/2a trial and showed that their stem cell therapy is safe to use in patients with a more serious form of cervical spinal cord injuries.

Earlier this month, we received more exciting updates from Asterias – this time reporting that the their embryonic stem cell-based therapy, called AST-OPC1, appeared to benefit treated patients. Five patients with severe spinal cord injuries to their neck were dosed, or transplanted, with 10 million cells. These patients are classified as AIS-A on the ASIA impairment scale – meaning they have complete injuries in which the spinal cord tissue is severed and patients lose all feeling and use of their limbs below the injury site. Amazingly, after three months, all five of the AIS-A patients have seen improvements in their movement.

Today, Asterias announced that it has treated its first patient with an AIS-B grade cervical spinal cord injury with a dose of 10 million cells at the Sheperd Center in Atlanta. AIS-B patients have incomplete neck injuries, meaning that they still have some spinal cord tissue at the injury site, some feeling in their arms and legs, but no movement. This type of spinal cord injury is still severe, but these patients have a better chance at gaining back some of their function and movement after treatment.

In a press release by Asterias, Chief Medical Officer Dr. Edward Wirth said:

“We have been very encouraged by the first look at the early efficacy data, as well as the safety profile, for AST-OPC1 in AIS-A patients, and now look forward to also evaluating efficacy and safety in AIS-B patients. AIS-B patients also have severe spinal cord injuries, but compared to AIS-A patients they have more spared tissue in their spinal cords.  This may allow these patients to have a greater chance of meaningful functional improvement after being treated with AST-OPC1 cells.”

Dr. Donald Peck Leslie, who directs the Sheperd Center and is the lead investigator at the Atlanta clinical trial site, expressed his excitement about the trials’ progress.

“As someone who regularly treats patients who have sustained paralyzing spinal cord injuries, I am encouraged by the progress we’ve seen in evaluations of AST-OPC1 in people with AIS-A injuries, particularly the improvements in hand, finger and arm function. Now, I am looking forward to continuing the evaluation of this promising new treatment in AIS-B patients, as well.”

Asterias has plans to enroll a total of five to eight AIS-B patients who will receive a dose of 10 million cells. They will continue to monitor all patients in this trial (both AIS-A and B) and will conduct long-term follow up studies to make sure that the AST-OPC1 treatment remains safe.

We hope that the brave patients who have participated in the Asterias trial continue to show improvements following treatment. Inspiring stories like that of Kris Boesen, who was the first AIS-A patient to get 10 million cells in the Asterias trial and now has regained the use of his arms and hands (and regaining some sensation in his legs), are the reason why CIRM exists and why we are working so hard to fund promising clinical trials. If we can develop even one stem cell therapy that gives patients back their life, then our efforts here at CIRM will be worthwhile.

Kris Boesen, CIRM spinal cord injury clinical trial patient.

Kris Boesen, CIRM spinal cord injury clinical trial patient.

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