Research

Targeted treatment for pediatric brain tumors shows promising results

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Image of medulloblastoma

Imagine sitting in the doctor’s office and being told the heartbreaking news that your child has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. As one might expect, the doctor states that the most effective treatment option is typically a combination of chemotherapy and radiation. However, the doctor reveals that there are additional risks to take into account that apply to children. Since children’s tiny bodies are still growing and developing, chemotherapy and radiation can cause long-term side effects such as intellectual disabilities. As a parent, it is painful enough to have to watch a child go through chemotherapy and radiation without adding permanent damage into the fold.

Sadly, this scenario is not unique. Medulloblastoma is the most prevalent form of a pediatric brain tumor with more than 350 children diagnosed with cancer each year. There are four distinct subtypes of medulloblastoma, with the deadliest being known as Group 3.

Researchers at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute (SBP) are trying to minimize the collateral damage by finding personalized treatments that reduce side effects while remaining effective. Scientists at SBP are working with an inhibitor known as LSD1 that specifically targets Group 3 medulloblastoma in a mouse model. The study, published in Nature Communications, showed that the drug dramatically decreased the size of tumors grown under the mouse’s skin by shrinking the cancer by more than 80 percent. This suggested that it could also be effective against patients’ tumors if it could be delivered to the brain. The LSD1 inhibitor has shown promise in clinical trials, where it has been tested for treating other types of cancer.

According to Robert Wechsler-Reya, Ph.D., senior author of the paper and director of the Tumor Initiation and Maintenance Program at SBP: “Our lab is working to understand the genetic pathways that drive medulloblastoma so we can find better ways to intervene and treat tumors. This study shows that a personalized treatment based upon a patient’s specific tumor type might be within our reach.”

Dr. Wechsler-Reya’s work on medulloblastoma was, in part, funded by the CIRM (LA1-01747) in the form of a Research Leadership Award for $5,226,049.

Promising Advances in Alzheimer’s Research Could Create More Advanced Therapy Options

/ Adonica Shaw / Leave a comment

Screen Shot 2018-08-01 at 12.10.55 PM

Photo Courtesy of NIH

New developments in Alzheimer’s research are bringing us closer to more precise therapies for this debilitating disease.

Alzheimer’s disease, is characterized by the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, which interfere with the normal communication flow between brain cells, leading to debilitating symptoms like memory loss and impaired decision-making. These plaques are made out of beta-amyloid proteins that stick together.

Over the past few years, researchers from several institutions have been working to develop antibodies that bind to and neutralize the toxic effects of the beta-amyloid. The search for effective antibodies, although promising, has been riddled with setbacks. Knowing this, a team of researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA, decided to approach this issue from a different angle – by conducting experiments to identify a better way of targeting beta-amyloid. Their goal was to develop a more efficient antibody to be used in Alzheimer’s therapy.

Principal investigator Dominic Walsh and team came up with a novel technique to collect beta-amyloid and to prepare it in the laboratory.

walsh-400x520

Dominic Walsh, PH.D.

“Many different efforts are currently underway to find treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, and anti-[beta-amyloid] antibodies are currently the furthest advanced,” says Walsh. “But the question remains: what are the most important forms of [beta-amyloid] to target? Our study points to some interesting answers,” the lead researcher adds, and these answers are now reported in an open access paper published in the journal Nature Communications.”

Beta-amyloid can be found in many forms. At one end of the spectrum, it exists as a single protein, or monomer, which isn’t necessarily toxic.

At the other end, there is the beta-amyloid plaque, in which many beta-amyloid proteins become tangled together. Beta-amyloid plaques are large enough to be observed using a traditional microscope, and they are involved in the development of Alzheimer’s.

In the current study, as well as in a previous one, Walsh and team looked at beta-amyloid structures to identify the ones that are most harmful in the brain.

Typically specialists use synthetic beta-amyloid samples to create a laboratory model of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain. Very few scientists actually collect beta-amyloid from the brains of individuals diagnosed with the disease.

In the current study, Walsh and team focused on finding better a more specific antibody to target the toxic forms of beta-amyloid but not the less harmful forms. To do so, they developed a novel screening test that requires extracting beta-amyloid from brain samples from people with Alzheimer’s. They added these extracts to induced pluripotent stem cell-derived human neurons and observed the ability of the different antibodies to block the toxic effects of the beta-amyloid.

This screening test allowed the team to discover a particular antibody — called “1C22” — that is able to block toxic forms of beta-amyloid more effectively than other antibodies currently being tested in clinical trials.

Walsh explained the implications of their novel screening method:

“We anticipate that this primary screening technique will be useful in the search to identify more potent anti-[beta-amyloid] therapeutics in the future.”

Life after SPARK: CIRM high school intern gets prestigious scholarship to Stanford

/ Karen Ring / Leave a comment

As part of our CIRM scholar blog series, we’re featuring the research and career accomplishments of CIRM funded students.

Ranya Odeh

Ranya Odeh

Meet Ranya Odeh. She is a senior at Sheldon high school in Elk Grove, California, and a 2016 CIRM SPARK intern. The SPARK program provides stem cell research internships to underprivileged high school students at leading research institutes in California.

This past summer, Ranya worked in Dr. Jan Nolta’s lab at UC Davis improving methods that turn mesenchymal stem cells into bone and fat cells. During her internship, Ranya did an excellent job of documenting her journey in the lab on Instagram and received a social media prize for her efforts.

Ranya is now a senior in high school and was recently accepted into Stanford University through the prestigious QuestBridge scholarship program. She credits the CIRM SPARK internship as one of the main reasons why she was awarded this scholarship, which will pay for all four years of her college.

I reached out to Ranya after I heard about her exciting news and asked her to share her story so that other high school students could learn from her experience and be inspired by her efforts.

How did you learn about the CIRM SPARK program?

At my high school, one of our assignments is to build a website for the Teen Biotech Challenge (TBC) program at UC Davis. I was a sophomore my first year in the program, and I didn’t feel passionate about my project and website. The year after, I saw that some of my friends had done the CIRM SPARK internship after they participated in the TBC program. They posted pictures about their internship on Instagram, and it looked like a really fun and interesting thing to do. So I decided to build another website (one that I was more excited about) in my junior year on synthetic biology. Then I entered my website in the TBC and got first prize in the Nanobiotechnology field. Because I was one of the winners, I got the SPARK internship.

What did you enjoy most about your SPARK experience?

For me, it was seeing that researchers aren’t just scientists in white lab coats. The Nolta lab (where I did my SPARK internship) had a lot of personality that I wasn’t really expecting. Working with stem cells was so cool but it was also nice to see at the same time that people in the lab would joke around and pull pranks on each other. It made me feel that if I wanted to have a future in research, which I do, it wouldn’t be doing all work all the time.

What was it like to do research for the first time?

Ranya taking care of her stem cells!

Ranya taking care of her stem cells!

The SPARK internship was my first introduction to research. During my first experiment, I remember I was changing media and I thought that I was throwing my cells away by mistake. So I freaked out, but then my mentor told me that I hadn’t and everything was ok. That was still a big deal and I learned a lesson to ask more questions and pay more attention to what I was doing.

Did the SPARK program help you when you applied to college?

Yes, I definitely feel like it did. I came into the internship wanting to be a pharmacist. But my research experience working with stem cells made me want to change my career path. Now I’m looking into a bioengineering degree, which has a research aspect to it and I’m excited for that. Having the SPARK internship on my college application definitely helped me out. I also got to have a letter of recommendation from Dr. Nolta, which I think played a big part as well.

Tell us about the scholarship you received!

I got the QuestBridge scholarship, which is a college match scholarship for low income, high achieving students. I found out about this program because my career counselor gave me a brochure. It’s actually a two-part scholarship. The first part was during my junior year of high school and that one didn’t involve a college acceptance. It was an award that included essay coaching and a conference that told you about the next step of the scholarship.

The second part during my senior year was called the national college match scholarship. It’s an application on its own that is basically like a college application. I submitted it and got selected as a finalist. After I was selected, they have partner colleges that offer full scholarships. You rank your choice of colleges and apply to them separately with a common application. If any of those colleges want to match you and agree to pay for all four years of your college, then you will get matched to your top choice. There’s a possibility that more than one college would want to match you, but you will only get matched with the one that you rank the highest. That was Stanford for me, and I am very happy about that.

Why did you pick Stanford as your top choice?

It’s the closest university to where I grew up that is very prestigious. It was also one of the only colleges I’ve visited. When I was walking around on campus, I felt I could see myself there as a student and with the Stanford community. Also, it will be really nice to be close to my family.

What do you do in your free time?

I don’t have a lot of free time because I’m in Academic Decathalon and I spend most of my time doing that. When I do have free time, I like to watch Netflix, blogs on YouTube, and I try to go to the gym [laughs].

Did you enjoy posting about your SPARK internship on Instagram?

I had a lot of fun posting pictures of me in the lab on Instagram. It was also nice during the summer to see other SPARK students in different programs talk about the same things. We shared jokes about micropipettes and culturing stem cells. It was really cool to see that you’re not the only one posting nerdy science pictures. I also felt a part of a larger community outside of the SPARK program. Even people at my school were seeing and commenting on what I was doing.

UC Davis CIRM SPARK program 2016

UC Davis CIRM SPARK program 2016

I also liked that I got feedback about what I was doing in the lab from other SPARK students. When I posted pictures during my internship, I talked about working with mesenchymal stem cells. Because we all post to the same #CIRMSPARKlab hashtag, I saw students from CalTech commenting that they worked with those stem cells too. That motivated me to work harder and accomplish more in my project. Instagram also helped me with my college application process. I saw that there were other students in the same position as me that were feeling stressed out. We also gave each other feedback on college essays and having advice about what I was doing really helped me out.

Do you think it’s important for students to be on social media?

Yes, I think it’s important with boundaries of course. There are probably some people who are on social media too often, and you should have a balance. But it’s nice to see what other students are doing to prepare for college and to let loose and catch up with your friends.

What advice would you give to younger high school students about pursuing science?

I feel like students can’t expect things to be brought to them. If they are interested in science, they need to take the initiative to find something that they are going to want to do. The CIRM internship was brought to my attention. But I have friends that were interested in medicine and they found their own internships and ways to learn more about what they wanted to do. So my advice is to take initiative and not be scared of rejection, because if you’re scared of rejection you’re not going to do anything.

To hear more about Ranya’s SPARK internship experience, read her blog “Here’s what you missed this summer on the show coats.” You can also follow her on Instagram and Twitter. For more information about the CIRM SPARK internship program, please visit the CIRM website.

Related Links:

Stem cell agency funds clinical trials in three life-threatening conditions

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

strategy-wide

A year ago the CIRM Board unanimously approved a new Strategic Plan for the stem cell agency. In the plan are some rather ambitious goals, including funding ten new clinical trials in 2016. For much of the last year that has looked very ambitious indeed. But today the Board took a big step towards reaching that goal, approving three clinical trials focused on some deadly or life-threatening conditions.

The first is Forty Seven Inc.’s work targeting colorectal cancer, using a monoclonal antibody that can strip away the cancer cells ability to evade  the immune system. The immune system can then attack the cancer. But just in case that’s not enough they’re going to hit the tumor from another side with an anti-cancer drug called cetuximab. It’s hoped this one-two punch combination will get rid of the cancer.

Finding something to help the estimated 49,000 people who die of colorectal cancer in the U.S. every year would be no small achievement. The CIRM Board thought this looked so promising they awarded Forty Seven Inc. $10.2 million to carry out a clinical trial to test if this approach is safe. We funded a similar approach by researchers at Stanford targeting solid tumors in the lung and that is showing encouraging results.

Our Board also awarded $7.35 million to a team at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles that is using stem cells to treat pulmonary hypertension, a form of high blood pressure in the lungs. This can have a devastating, life-changing impact on a person leaving them constantly short of breath, dizzy and feeling exhausted. Ultimately it can lead to heart failure.

The team at Cedars-Sinai will use cells called cardiospheres, derived from heart stem cells, to reduce inflammation in the arteries and reduce blood pressure. CIRM is funding another project by this team using a similar  approach to treat people who have suffered a heart attack. This work showed such promise in its Phase 1 trial it’s now in a larger Phase 2 clinical trial.

The largest award, worth $20 million, went to target one of the rarest diseases. A team from UCLA, led by Don Kohn, is focusing on Adenosine Deaminase Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (ADA-SCID), which is a rare form of a rare disease. Children born with this have no functioning immune system. It is often fatal in the first few years of life.

The UCLA team will take the patient’s own blood stem cells, genetically modify them to fix the mutation that is causing the problem, then return them to the patient to create a new healthy blood and immune system. The team have successfully used this approach in curing 23 SCID children in the last few years – we blogged about it here – and now they have FDA approval to move this modified approach into a Phase 2 clinical trial.

So why is CIRM putting money into projects that it has either already funded in earlier clinical trials or that have already shown to be effective? There are a number of reasons. First, our mission is to accelerate stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. Each of the diseases funded today represent an unmet medical need. Secondly, if something appears to be working for one problem why not try it on another similar one – provided the scientific rationale and evidence shows it is appropriate of course.

As Randy Mills, our President and CEO, said in a news release:

“Our Board’s support for these programs highlights how every member of the CIRM team shares that commitment to moving the most promising research out of the lab and into patients as quickly as we can. These are very different projects, but they all share the same goal, accelerating treatments to patients with unmet medical needs.”

We are trying to create a pipeline of projects that are all moving towards the same goal, clinical trials in people. Pipelines can be horizontal as well as vertical. So we don’t really care if the pipeline moves projects up or sideways as long as they succeed in moving treatments to patients. And I’m guessing that patients who get treatments that change their lives don’t particularly

Using skin cells to repair damaged hearts

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

heart-muscle

Heart muscle  cells derived from skin cells

When someone has a heart attack, getting treatment quickly can mean the difference between life and death. Every minute delay in getting help means more heart cells die, and that can have profound consequences. One study found that heart attack patients who underwent surgery to re-open blocked arteries within 60 minutes of arriving in the emergency room had a six times greater survival rate than people who had to wait more than 90 minutes for the same treatment.

Clearly a quick intervention can be life-saving, which means an approach that uses a patient’s own stem cells to treat a heart attack won’t work. It simply takes too long to harvest the healthy heart cells, grow them in the lab, and re-inject them into the patient. By then the damage is done.

Now a new study shows that an off-the-shelf approach, using donor stem cells, might be the most effective way to go. Scientists at Shinshu University in Japan, used heart muscle stem cells from one monkey, to repair the damaged hearts of five other monkeys.

In the study, published in the journal Nature, the researchers took skin cells from a macaque monkey, turned those cells into induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), and then turned those cells into cardiomyocytes or heart muscle cells. They then transplanted those cardiomyocytes into five other monkeys who had experienced an induced heart attack.

After 3 months the transplanted monkeys showed no signs of rejection and their hearts showed improved ability to contract, meaning they were pumping blood around the body more powerfully and efficiently than before they got the cardiomyocytes.

It’s an encouraging sign but it comes with a few caveats. One is that the monkeys used were all chosen to be as close a genetic match to the donor monkey as possible. This reduced the risk that the animals would reject the transplanted cells. But when it comes to treating people, it may not be feasible to have a wide selection of heart stem cell therapies on hand at every emergency room to make sure they are a good genetic match to the patient.

The second caveat is that all the transplanted monkeys experienced an increase in arrhythmias or irregular heartbeats. However, Yuji Shiba, one of the researchers, told the website ResearchGate that he didn’t think this was a serious issue:

“Ventricular arrhythmia was induced by the transplantation, typically within the first four weeks. However, this post-transplant arrhythmia seems to be transient and non-lethal. All five recipients of [the stem cells] survived without any abnormal behaviour for 12 weeks, even during the arrhythmia. So I think we can manage this side effect in clinic.”

Even with the caveats, this study demonstrates the potential for a donor-based stem cell therapy to treat heart attacks. This supports an approach already being tested by Capricor in a CIRM-funded clinical trial. In this trial the company is using donor cells, derived from heart stem cells, to treat patients who developed heart failure after a heart attack. In early studies the cells appear to reduce scar tissue on the heart, promote blood vessel growth and improve heart function.

The study from Japan shows the possibilities of using a ready-made stem cell approach to helping repair damage caused by a heart attacks. We’re hoping Capricor will take it from a possibility, and turn it into a reality.

If you would like to read some recent blog posts about Capricor go here and here.

How the Ice Bucket Challenge changed the fight against ALS

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Ice Bucket2

200 people in Boston take the Ice Bucket Challenge: Photo courtesy Forbes

A couple of years ago millions of people did something they probably never thought they would: they dumped a bucket of ice cold water on their head to raise awareness about a disease most of them had probably never heard of, and almost certainly knew very little about.

The disease was ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and the Ice Bucket Challenge was something that went from a fun idea by a supporter of the ALS Association, to a blockbuster $220 million fundraiser. Like any good idea it sparked a backlash with critics accusing it of being a lazy way for people to feel good without actually doing anything, of diverting money from other charities, and even of just wasting water at a time of drought (at least here in California.)

But two years later we can now look back and see if those critics were correct, and if the money raised did make a difference. And the answer, I’m happy to say, is no and yes. In that order.

An article in the New Yorker magazine, by James Surowiecki, takes a look at what has happened since the Ice Bucket Challenge exploded on the scene and it has some good news:

  • Contributions to the ALS Association remain higher than before the Challenge
  • The average age of donors dropped from 50+ to 35
  • The Challenge may have helped spur an increase in overall donations to charity

All this is, of course, excellent news. But there’s an even more important point, which is that the money raised by the Challenge has helped advance ALS research further and faster than ever before.

Barbara Newhouse, the CEO of the ALS Association told Surowiecki:

“The research environment is dramatically different from what it was. We’re seeing research that’s really moving the needle not just on the causes of the disease but also on treatments and therapies.”

As an example Newhouse cites a study, published in Science  last summer, by researchers at Johns Hopkins that helped explain protein clumps found in the brains of people with ALS. Philip Wong, one of the lead authors of the study, says money raised by the Challenge helped make their work possible;

“Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to come out with the studies as quickly as we did. The funding from the ice bucket is just a component of the whole—in part, it facilitated our effort.”

And just this week the ALS Association said funding from the Challenge helped identify a gene connected to the disease.

Having been one of those who took a dunk for science – and we did ours early on, when the Challenge had only raised $4m – it’s nice to know something as silly and simple can have such a profound impact on developing treatments for a deadly disorder.

 

 

Call to Action by FDA at World Stem Cell Summit

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

Califf

FDA Deputy Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf talking at the World Stem Cell Summit

The World Stem Cell Summit annual conference in Atlanta kicked off today with a clarion call from Dr. Robert Califf, the Deputy Commissioner for the Food and Drug Administration. He told the audience:

“We want you to accelerate translation to produce safe and effective therapies that can be delivered reliably”

It was a message that everyone in the room, scientists and patient advocates, would love to be able to comply with. The question of course is how do you do that in a way that puts the emphasis on both speed, to get the therapies to patients who need them, and safety, so you don’t put those patients at risk.

That’s quite a challenge considering that, as panel moderator Julie Allickson of Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine said:

“the estimate now is it costs $2.4 billion and up to ten years to take something to the clinic.”

Even if that dollar amount is higher than many think it would take to bring a stem cell therapy to a clinical trial it is an indication of the challenge the field faces.

Califf, who has only been at the FDA for 8 months, says that regenerative medicine is:

“not the only field exploding with scientific knowledge and seeing a future that’s very different from what we see today so it’s exciting but also an enormous challenge for the FDA. One of the real eye openers for me is to be at the FDA and hear about drugs that have been on the market for 45 years and we’re still learning about them.”

He says the first goal of the FDA has to be to protect the public, and that it’s hard to balance safety and innovation. “That’s an issue we struggle with every day.”

Califf was optimistic that the balance can be struck and progress can be made, but said that this can only truly be done if the patient is at the table as an active participant.

“Our national clinical research system is well intention but flawed. We need to have a new system that shares information right across the system and where patients are at the center. Patients should be driving the national research infrastructure. They are an essential part of change. It’s happening in Congress because they are hearing from constituents that this is what they want, a voice in the research being done that affects them.”

For the patients and patient advocates in the audience it was a welcome message. For years they have been calling for a louder voice in the research that affects them and their loved ones. Knowing they have a sympathetic ear in the FDA could be an encouraging sign that their voices are finally being heard.

We will be writing more as the conference unfolds so stay tuned!