RMAT

Identifying the visually impaired patients most likely to benefit from jCyte’s stem cell therapy

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments

We have written about jCyte many times on The Stem Cellar. For one reason, they are showing really encouraging results in their treatment for retinitis pigmentosa (RP). And now they have taken an even deeper dive into those results and identified which patients may be most likely to benefit from the therapy.

RP is a rare genetic disorder that slowly destroys the rods and cones, the light sensing cells in the back of the eye. If you look at the image below the one on the left shows normal vision, the one on the right shows what happens with RP. At first you start to lose night vision, then other parts of your vision are slowly eroded until you are legally blind.

RP starts early, often people are diagnosed in their teens and are legally blind by middle age. There is no treatment, no cure. It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 people in the US have RP, as many as two million worldwide.

That’s where jCyte comes in. They developed jCell, a therapy using adult stem cells that have been changed into human retinal progenitor cells (hRPCs). These are injected into the back of the eye where they secrete small proteins called neurotrophic factors.

Dr. Henry Klassen, one of the founders of jCyte, says jCell works by preserving the remaining photoreceptors in the eye, and helping them bounce back.

“Typically, people think about the disease as a narrowing of this peripheral vision in a very nice granular way, but that’s actually not what happens. What happens in the disease is that patients lose like islands of vision. So, what we’re doing in our tests is actually measuring […] islands that the patients have at baseline, and then what we’re seeing after treatment is that the islands are expanding. It’s similar to the way that one would track, let’s say a tumor, in oncology of course we’re looking for the opposite effect. We’re looking for the islands of vision to expand.”

And in patients treated with jCell those islands of vision did expand. The team followed patients for one-year post treatment and found that patients given the highest dose, six million cells, experienced the biggest improvement and were able to read, on average, 16 more letters on a standard eye chart than they had been before treatment. In comparison people given a sham or placebo treatment only had an improvement of less than two letters.

This group also experienced improvements in their peripheral vision, their ability to distinguish objects in the foreground from the background and were better able to get around in low light.

But that’s not all. Dr. Sunil Srivastava, with the Cleveland Clinic Cole Eye Institute, did a detailed analysis of patients treated in the trial and identified central foveal thickness (CFT- the part of the eye located in the center of the retina) as an important marker for who would be most likely to benefit from jCell. People who started out with a higher CFT score were most likely to get the biggest benefits.

In a news release, jCyte CEO Dr. Shannon Blalock said the findings are really encouraging: “We look forward to working closely with our scientific advisory board and principal investigators to apply these key learnings to our upcoming pivotal study of jCell to optimize its probability of success in an effort to advance the clinical development program of our RMAT designated therapy for RP patients who currently have no treatment options.”

Prime Time for Rocket

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Rocket Pharmaceuticals, a company that specializes in developing genetic therapies for rare childhood disorders, just got a big boost from the European Medicines Agency (EMA). They were given a Priority Medicines (PRIME) designation for their therapy for Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-1 (LAD-1).

CIRM is funding ($6.56 million) Rocket’s clinical trial for LAD-I, an immune disorder that leaves patients vulnerable to repeated infections that often results in death within the first two years of life. The therapy involves taking some of the child’s own blood stem cells and, in the lab, correcting the mutation that causes LAD-I, then returning those cells to the patient. Hopefully those blood stem cells then create a new, healthy blood supply and repair the immune system.

The therapy, called RP-L201, is already showing promise in the clinical trial, hence the PRIME designation. The program was set up to help speed up development and evaluation of therapies that could help patients who have limited treatment options. Getting a PRIME designation means it is considered a priority by EMA and could reach patients sooner.

In the US, Rocket has won similar recognition from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and has been granted Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT), Rare Pediatric Disease, and Fast Track designations.

In a news release Kinnari Patel, President and Chief Operating Officer of Rocket, said the designation showed that regulators understand the urgent need to develop a therapy for patients with LAD-1. “More than half of LAD-I patients suffer with a severe variant in which mortality occurs in up to 75% of young children who don’t receive a successful bone marrow transplant by the age of two. Securing all possible accelerated designations will enable us to collaborate with both the FDA and EMA to speed the development and delivery of a potential treatment for these patients.  We look forward to sharing initial Phase 2 data from our potentially registration-enabling LAD-I trial in the second quarter of 2021.”

That trial has now completed enrolling patients (nine altogether) but their treatments are not yet complete. LAD-1 patients with severe disease have low levels of a key protein called CD18, usually less than 2%. Of the first three patients treated in this trial CD18 levels are all higher than the 4-10% threshold considered necessary for these children to survive into adulthood. Another encouraging sign is that there were no serious side effects from the therapy.

Obviously there is still a long way to go before we know if this therapy really works, but the PRIME designation – along with the similar ones in the US – are recognition that this is a very promising start.

Going the extra mile to save a patient’s life

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You can tell an awful lot about a company by the people it hires and the ability it gives them to do their job in an ethical, principled way. By that measure Rocket Pharma is a pretty darn cool company.

Rocket Pharma is running a CIRM-funded clinical trial for Leukocyte Adhesion Deficiency-I (LAD-I), a rare genetic immune disorder that leaves patients vulnerable to repeated infections that often results in death within the first two years of life. The therapy involves taking some of the child’s own blood stem cells and, in the lab, correcting the mutation that causes LAD-I, then returning those cells to the patient. Hopefully those blood stem cells then create a new, healthy blood supply and repair the immune system.

So far, they have treated the majority of the nine patients in this Phase 1/2 clinical trial. Here’s the story of three of those children, all from the same family. Every patient’s path to the treatment has been uniquely challenging. For one family, it’s been a long, rough road, but one that shows how committed Rocket Pharma (Rocket) is to helping people in need.

The patient, a young girl, is from India. The family has already lost one child to what was almost certainly LAD-I, and now they faced the very real prospect of losing their daughter too. She had already suffered numerous infections and the future looked bleak. Fortunately, the team at Rocket heard about her and decided they wanted to help enroll her in their clinical trial.

Dr. Gayatri Rao, Rocket Pharmaceuticals

Dr. Gayatri Rao, the Global Program Head for the LAD-I therapy, this patient was about 6 months old when they heard about her: “She had already been in and out of the hospital numerous times so the family were really interested in enrolling the patient. But getting the family to the US was daunting.”

Over the course of several months, the team at Rocket helped navigate the complicated immigration process. Because the parents and child would need to make several trips to the US for treatment and follow-up exams they would need multiple-entry visas. “Just to get all the paper work necessary was a monumental task. Everything had to be translated because the family didn’t speak English. By the time the family flew to Delhi for their visa interview they had a dossier that filled a 3 inch binder.”  Rocket worked closely with partners in India to provide the family on-the-ground support every step of the way.  To help ensure the family received the visas they needed, Rocket also reached out to members of Congress and six members wrote in support of the family’s application.

Finally, everything fell into place. The family had the visas, all the travel arrangements were made. The Rocket team had even found an apartment near the UCLA campus where the family would stay during the treatment and stocked it with Indian food.

But on the eve of their flight to the US, the coronavirus pandemic hit. International flights were cancelled. Borders were closed. A year of work was put on hold and, more important, the little girl’s life hung in the balance.

Over the course of the next few months the little girl suffered several infections and had to be hospitalized. The family caught COVID and had to undergo quarantine till they recovered. But still the Rocket team kept working on a plan to bring them to the US. Finally, in late January, as vaccines became available and international flights opened up once again, the family were able to come to the US. One west-coast based Rocket team member even made sure that upon arriving to the apartment in UCLA, there was a home-cooked meal, a kitchen stocked with groceries, and handmade cards welcoming them to help transition the family into their new temporary “home.” They are now in living in that apartment near UCLA, waiting for the treatment to start.

Gayatri says it would have been easy to say: “this is too hard” and try to find another patient in the trial, but no one at Rocket wanted to do that: “Once a patient gets identified, we feel like we know them and the team feels invested in doing everything we can for them. We know it may not work out. But at the end of the day, we recognize that this child often has no other choices, and that motivates us to keep going despite the challenges.  If anything, this experience has taught us that with persistence and creativity, we can surmount these challenges.”

Maybe doing the right thing brings its own rewards, because this earlier this month Rocket was granted Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation for their treatment for LAD-I. This is a big deal because it means the therapy has already shown it appears to be safe and potentially beneficial to patients, so the designation means that if it continues to be safe and effective it may be eligible for a faster, more streamlined approval process. And that means it can get to the patients who need it, outside of a clinical trial, faster.

Hitting our goals: regulatory reform

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Way, way back in 2015 – seems like a lifetime ago doesn’t it – the team at CIRM sat down and planned out our Big 6 goals for the next five years. The end result was a Strategic Plan that was bold, ambitious and set us on course to do great things or kill ourselves trying. Well, looking back we can take some pride in saying we did a really fine job, hitting almost every goal and exceeding them in some cases. So, as we plan our next five-year Strategic Plan we thought it worthwhile to look back at where we started and what we achieved. We are going to start with Regulatory Reform.

The political landscape in 2015 was dramatically different than it is today. Compared to more conventional drugs and therapies stem cells were considered a new, and very different, approach to treating diseases and disorders. At the time the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was taking a very cautious approach to approving any stem cell therapies for a clinical trial.

A survey of CIRM stakeholders found that 70% said the FDA was “the biggest impediment for the development of stem cell treatments.” One therapy, touted by the FDA as a success story, had such a high clinical development hurdle placed on it that by the time it was finally approved, five years later, its market potential had significantly eroded and the product failed commercially. As one stakeholder said: “Is perfect becoming the enemy of better?”

So, we set ourselves a goal of establishing a new regulatory paradigm, working with Congress, academia, industry, and patients, to bring about real change at the FDA and to find ways to win faster approval for promising stem cell therapies, without in any way endangering patients.

It seemed rather ambitious at the time, but achieving that goal happened much faster than any of us anticipated. With a sustained campaign by CIRM and other industry leaders, working with the patient advocacy groups, the FDA, Congress, and President Obama, the 21st Century Cures Act was signed into law on December 13, 2016.

President Obama signs the 21st Century Cures Act.
Photo courtesy of NBC News

The law did something quite radical; it made the perspectives of patients an integral part of the FDA’s decision-making and approval process in the development of drugs, biological products and devices. And it sped up the review process by:

In a way the FDA took its foot off the brake but didn’t hit the accelerator, so the process moved faster, but in a safe, manageable way.

Fast forward to today and eight projects that CIRM funds have been granted RMAT designation. We have become allies with the FDA in helping advance the field. We have created a unique partnership with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to support the Cure Sickle Cell initiative and accelerate the development of cell and gene therapies for sickle cell disease.

The landscape has changed since we set a goal of regulatory reform. We still have work to do. But now we are all working together to achieve the change we all believe is both needed and possible.

CIRM-funded therapy to ease the impact of chemotherapy

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Treatments for cancer have advanced a lot in recent years, but many still rely on the use of chemotherapy to either shrink tumors before surgery or help remove cancerous cells the surgery missed. The chemo can be very effective, but it’s also very toxic. Angiocrine Bioscience Inc. is developing a way to reduce those toxic side effects, and they just got a nice vote of confidence for that approach.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Angiocrine Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation for their product AB-205.

RMAT is a big deal. It means the therapy, in this case AB-205, has already shown it is safe and potentially beneficial to patients, so the designation means that if it continues to be safe and effective it may be eligible for a faster, more streamlined approval process. And that means it can get to the patients who need it, outside of a clinical trial, faster.

What is AB-205? Well it’s made from genetically engineered cells, derived from cord blood, designed to help alleviate or accelerate recovery from the toxic side effects of chemotherapy for people undergoing treatment for lymphoma and other aggressive cancers of the blood or lymph system.

CIRM awarded Angiocrine Bioscience $6.2 million in 2018 to help carry out the Phase 2 clinical trial testing the therapy. In a news release ,CIRM President & CEO, Dr. Maria Millan, said there is a real need for this kind of therapy.

“This is a project that CIRM has supported from an earlier stage of research, highlighting our commitment to moving the most promising research out of the lab and into people. Lymphoma is the most common blood cancer and the 6th most commonly diagnosed cancer in California. Despite advances in therapy many patients still suffer severe complications from the chemotherapy, so any treatment that can reduce those complications can not only improve quality of life but also, we hope, improve long term health outcomes for patients.”

In a news release Dr. Paul Finnegan, Angiocrine’s CEO, welcomed the news.

“The RMAT designation speaks to the clinical meaningfulness and the promising efficacy data and safety profile of AB-205 based on our Phase 1b/2 study. This is an important step in accelerating the development of AB-205 towards its first market approval. We appreciate the thorough assessment provided by the FDA reviewers and the support from our partner, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.” 

The investment in Angiocrine marked a milestone for CIRM. It was the 50th clinical trial we had funded. It was a cause for celebration then. We’re hoping it will be a cause for an even bigger celebration in the not too distant future.

The company hopes to start a Phase 3 clinical trial in the US and Europe next year.

Stem cell therapy for deadly childhood immune disorder goes four for four

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The gold standard for any new therapy in the U.S. is approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This approval clears the therapy for sale and often also means it will be covered by insurance. But along the way there are other designations that can mean a lot to a company developing a new approach to a deadly disease.

That’s what recently happened with Mustang Bio’s MB-107. The therapy was given Orphan Drug Designation for the treatment of X-linked Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) also known as “bubble baby disease”, a rare but deadly immune disorder affecting children. This is the same therapy that CIRM is funding in a clinical trial we’ve blogged about in the past.  

Getting Orphan Drug Designation can be a big deal. It is given to therapies intended for the treatment, diagnosis or prevention of rare diseases or disorders that affect fewer than 200,000 people in the U.S. It comes with some sweet incentives, such as tax credits toward the cost of clinical trials and prescription drug user fee waivers. And, if the product becomes the first in its class to get FDA approval for a particular disease, it is entitled to seven years of market exclusivity, which is independent from intellectual property protection.

This is not the first time Mustang Bio’s MB-107 has been acknowledged as a potential gamechanger. It’s also been given three other classifications both here in the US and in Europe.

  • Rare Pediatric Disease Designation: this also applies to treatments for diseases affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US that have the potential to provide clinically meaningful benefits to patients. It provides the company with a “voucher” that they can use to apply for priority review for another therapy they are developing. The hope is that this will encourage companies to develop treatments for rare childhood diseases that might not otherwise be profitable.
  • Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation: this allows for faster, more streamlined approvals of regenerative medicine products
  • Advanced Therapy Medicinal Product classification: this is granted by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to medicines that are based on genes, tissues or cells and can offer groundbreaking opportunities for the treatment of disease.

Of course, none of these designations are a guarantee that Mustang Bio’s MB-107 will ultimately get FDA approval, but they’re a pretty good indication that a lot of people have confidence they’ll get there.

CIRM-funded kidney transplant procedure eyeing faster approval

/ Kevin McCormack / 2 Comments
Kidney transplant surgery.

Medeor Therapeutics, which is running a CIRM-funded clinical trial to help people getting kidney transplants, just got some really good news. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just granted their product Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation. That’s a big deal because it means they may be able to apply for faster review and approval and get their therapy to more patients faster.

Here’s why that RMAT designation matters.

Over 650,000 Americans suffer from end-stage kidney disease – a life-threatening condition caused by the loss of kidney function. The best available treatment for these patients is a kidney transplant from a genetically matched living donor. However, patients who receive a transplant must take life-long immunosuppressive drugs to prevent their immune system from rejecting the transplanted organ. Over time, these drugs are toxic and can increase a patient’s risk of infection, heart disease, cancer and diabetes.  Despite these drugs, many patients still lose transplanted organs due to rejection.

To tackle this problem Medeor is developing a stem cell-based therapy called MDR-101. This is being tested in a Phase 3 clinical trial and it’s hoped it will eliminate the need for immunosuppressive drugs in genetically matched kidney transplant patients.

The company takes blood-forming stem cells and immune cells from the organ donor and infuses them into the patient receiving the donor’s kidney. Introducing the donor’s immune cells into the patient creates a condition called “mixed chimerism” where immune cells from the patient and the donor are able to co-exist. In this way, the patient’s immune system is able to adapt to and tolerate the donor’s kidney, potentially eliminating the need for the immunosuppressive drugs that are normally necessary to prevent transplant rejection.

So how does getting RMAT designation help that? Well, the FDA created the RMAT program to help speed up the development and review of regenerative medicine therapies that can treat, modify, reverse, or cure a serious condition. If MDR-101shows it is both safe and effective RMAT could help it get faster approval for wider use.

In a news release Giovanni Ferrara, President and CEO of Medeor, welcomed the news.

“This important designation underscores the tremendous unmet medical need for alternatives to today’s immunosuppressive therapies for transplantation. We have the potential to help people live longer, healthier lives without the need for high dose and chronic immunosuppression and we thank the FDA for this designation that will assist us progressing as efficiently as possible toward a commercially available product.”

This is the seventh CIRM-supported project that has been granted RMAT designation. The others are jCyte, Lineage, Humacyte, St. Jude’s/UCSF X-linked SCID, Poseida, Capricor

A clear vision for the future

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Dr. Henry Klassen and Dr. Jing Yang, founders of jCyte

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Bresge, jCyte CEO

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

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

How developing a treatment for a rare disease could lead to therapies for other, not-so-rare conditions

/ Kevin McCormack / 3 Comments
Logan Lacy, a child with AADC Deficiency: Photo courtesy Chambersburg Public Opinion

Tomorrow, the last day in February, is Rare Disease Day. It’s a day dedicated to raising awareness about rare diseases and the impact they have on patients and their families.

But the truth is rare diseases are not so rare. There are around 7,000 diseases that affect fewer than 200,000 Americans at any given time. In fact, it’s estimated that around one in 20 people will live with a rare disease at some point in their lives. Many may die from it.

This blog is about one man’s work to find a cure for one of those rare diseases, and how that could lead to a therapy for something that affects many millions of people around the world.

Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz; Photo courtesy Ohio State Medical Center

Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz is a brain surgeon at U.C. San Francisco and The Ohio State University. He is also the President and CEO at Brain Neurotherapy Bio and a world expert in delivering gene and other therapies to the brain. More than 20 years ago, he began trying to develop a treatment for Parkinson’s disease by looking at a gene responsible for AADC enzyme production, which plays an important role in the brain and central nervous system.  AADC is critical for the formation of serotonin and dopamine, chemicals that transmit signals between nerve cells, the latter of which plays a role in the development of Parkinson’s disease.

While studying the AADC enzyme, Dr. Bankiewicz learned of an extremely rare disorder where children lack the AADC enzyme that is critical for their development.  This condition significantly inhibits communication between the brain and the rest of the body, leading to extremely limited mobility, muscle spasms, and problems with overall bodily functions.  As a result of this, AADC deficient children require lifelong care, and particularly severe cases can lead to death in the first ten years of life.

“These children can’t speak. They have no muscle control, so they can’t do fundamental things such as walking, supporting their neck or lifting their arms,” says Dr. Bankiewicz. “They have involuntary movements, experience tremendously painful spasms almost like epileptic seizures. They can’t feed themselves and have to be fed through a tube in their stomach.”

So, Dr. Bankiewicz, building on his understanding of the gene that encodes AADC, developed an experimental approach to deliver a normal copy, injected directly into the midbrain, the area responsible for dopamine production. The DDC gene was inserted into a virus that acted as a kind of transport, carrying the gene into neurons, the brain cells affected by the condition. It was hoped that once inside, the gene would allow the body to produce the AADC enzyme and, in turn, enable it to produce its own dopamine .

And that’s exactly what happened.

“It’s unbelievable. In the first treated patients their motor system is dramatically improved, they are able to better control their movements, they can eat, they can sleep well. These are tremendous benefits. We have been following these children for almost three years post-treatment, and the progression we see doesn’t stop, it keeps going and we see these children keep on improving. Now they are able to get physical therapy to help them. Some are even able to go to school.”

For Dr. Bankiewicz this has been decades in the making, but that only makes it all the more gratifying: “This doesn’t happen very often in your lifetime, to be able to use all your professional experience and education to help people and see the impact it has on people’s lives.”

So far he has treated 20 patients from the US, UK and all over the world.

But he is far from finished.

Already the therapy has been given Orphan Drug Designation and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy designation by the US Food and Drug Administration. The former is a kind of financial incentive to companies to develop drugs for rare diseases. The latter gives therapies that are proving to be both safe and effective, an accelerated path to approval for wider use. Dr. Bankiewicz hopes that will help them raise the funds needed to treat children with this rare condition.  “We want to make this affordable for families. We are not in this to make a profit; we want to get foundations and maybe even pharmaceutical companies to help us treat the kids, so they don’t have to cover the full costs themselves.”

CIRM has not funded any of this work, but the data and results from this research were important factors in our Board awarding Dr. Bankiewicz more than $5.5 million to begin a clinical trial for Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Bankiewicz is using a similar approach in that work to the one he has shown can help children with AADC deficiency.

While AADC deficiency may only affect a few hundred children worldwide, it’s estimated that Parkinson’s affects more than ten million people; one million of those in the US alone.  Developing this gene therapy technique in a rare disease, therefore, may ultimately benefit large populations of patients.

So, on this Rare Disease Day, we celebrate Dr. Bankiewicz and others whose compassion and commitment to finding treatments to help those battling rare conditions are helping change the world, one patient at a time.

You can follow the story of one child treated by Dr. Bankiewicz here.

Stem Cell Agency Approves Funding for Clinical Trials Targeting Parkinson’s Disease and Blindness

/ Yimy Villa / 4 Comments

The governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) yesterday invested $32.92 million to fund the Stem Cell Agency’s first clinical trial in Parkinson’s disease (PD), and to support three clinical trials targeting different forms of vision loss.

This brings the total number of clinical trials funded by CIRM to 60.

The PD trial will be carried out by Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz at Brain Neurotherapy Bio, Inc. He is using a gene therapy approach to promote the production of a protein called GDNF, which is best known for its ability to protect dopaminergic neurons, the kind of cell damaged by Parkinson’s. The approach seeks to increase dopamine production in the brain, alleviating PD symptoms and potentially slowing down the disease progress.

David Higgins, PhD, a CIRM Board member and patient advocate for Parkinson’s says there is a real need for new approaches to treating the disease. In the US alone, approximately 60,000 people are diagnosed with PD each year and it is expected that almost one million people will be living with the disease by 2020.

“Parkinson’s Disease is a serious unmet medical need and, for reasons we don’t fully understand, its prevalence is increasing. There’s always more outstanding research to fund than there is money to fund it. The GDNF approach represents one ‘class’ of potential therapies for Parkinson’s Disease and has the potential to address issues that are even broader than this specific therapy alone.”

The Board also approved funding for two clinical trials targeting retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a blinding eye disease that affects approximately 150,000 individuals in the US and 1.5 million people around the world. It is caused by the destruction of light-sensing cells in the back of the eye known as photoreceptors.  This leads to gradual vision loss and eventually blindness.  There are currently no effective treatments for RP.

Dr. Henry Klassen and his team at jCyte are injecting human retinal progenitor cells (hRPCs), into the vitreous cavity, a gel-filled space located in between the front and back part of the eye. The proposed mechanism of action is that hRPCs secrete neurotrophic factors that preserve, protect and even reactivate the photoreceptors, reversing the course of the disease.

CIRM has supported early development of Dr. Klassen’s approach as well as preclinical studies and two previous clinical trials.  The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted jCyte Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy (RMAT) designation based on the early clinical data for this severe unmet medical need, thus making the program eligible for expedited review and approval.

The other project targeting RP is led by Dr. Clive Svendsen from the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute. In this approach, human neural progenitor cells (hNPCs) are transplanted to the back of the eye of RP patients. The goal is that the transplanted hNPCs will integrate and create a protective layer of cells that prevent destruction of the adjacent photoreceptors. 

The third trial focused on vision destroying diseases is led by Dr. Sophie Deng at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Dr. Deng’s clinical trial addresses blinding corneal disease by targeting limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD). Under healthy conditions, limbal stem cells (LSCs) continuously regenerate the cornea, the clear front surface of the eye that refracts light entering the eye and is responsible for the majority of the optical power. Without adequate limbal cells , inflammation, scarring, eye pain, loss of corneal clarity and gradual vision loss can occur. Dr. Deng’s team will expand the patient’s own remaining LSCs for transplantation and will use  novel diagnostic methods to assess the severity of LSCD and patient responses to treatment. This clinical trial builds upon previous CIRM-funded work, which includes early translational and late stage preclinical projects.

“CIRM funds and accelerates promising early stage research, through development and to clinical trials,” says Maria T. Millan, MD, President and CEO of CIRM. “Programs, such as those funded today, that were novel stem cell or gene therapy approaches addressing a small number of patients, often have difficulty attracting early investment and funding. CIRM’s role is to de-risk these novel regenerative medicine approaches that are based on rigorous science and have the potential to address unmet medical needs. By de-risking programs, CIRM has enabled our portfolio programs to gain significant downstream industry funding and partnership.”

CIRM Board also awarded $5.53 million to Dr. Rosa Bacchetta at Stanford to complete work necessary to conduct a clinical trial for IPEX syndrome, a rare disease caused by mutations in the FOXP3 gene. Immune cells called regulatory T Cells normally function to protect tissues from damage but in patients with IPEX syndrome, lack of functional Tregs render the body’s own tissues and organs to autoimmune attack that could be fatal in early childhood.  Current treatment options include a bone marrow transplant which is limited by available donors and graft versus host disease and immune suppressive drugs that are only partially effective. Dr. Rosa Bacchetta and her team at Stanford will use gene therapy to insert a normal version of the FOXP3 gene into the patient’s own T Cells to restore the normal function of regulatory T Cells.

The CIRM Board also approved investing $15.80 million in four awards in the Translational Research program. The goal of this program is to help promising projects complete the testing needed to begin talking to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) about holding a clinical trial.

The TRAN1 Awards are summarized in the table below:

ApplicationTitleInstitutionAward Amount
TRAN1 11536Ex Vivo Gene Editing of Human Hematopoietic Stem Cells for the Treatment of X-Linked Hyper IgM Syndrome  UCLA $4,896,628
TRAN1 11555BCMA/CS1 Bispecific CAR-T Cell Therapy to Prevent Antigen Escape in Multiple Myeloma  UCLA $3,176,805
TRAN1 11544 Neural Stem cell-mediated oncolytic immunotherapy for ovarian cancer  City of Hope $2,873,262
TRAN1 11611Development of a human stem cell-derived inhibitory neuron therapeutic for the treatment of chronic focal epilepsyNeurona Therapeutics$4,848,750