When I helped plan the first Partnering Forum at the Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa four years ago, I must admit it felt a bit early for the stated goal of the meeting, which was to bring together academic research teams and early stage biotech companies with big pharmaceutical companies and other investors who could help take the therapies to the patients. The air of the resulting meeting was excitement moderated by caution and a healthy dose of skepticism.

This year’s even that ended yesterday felt very different. First it grew from a couple hundred to more than 700. It followed a period that saw a series of major investments in the field. One speaker noted that in the previous 12 months, $2.5 billion had been invested in cell and gene therapies, double the amount of the prior 12 months. At one panel discussion, a venture capital executive announced that his company was ready to invest in one of our grantees. He had seen them present their research in prior years and their project was not ready then, but it is now.

A panel on regulatory hurdles to advancing cell therapies, including CIRM senior VP Ellen Feigal (second from left) talked about the need for the community to share information.

Many speakers still called for caution, but at a different level. Several companies are expected to report results from Phase 3 clinical trials—the large late stage trials that decide if a therapy is ready for marketing—and they noted that the industry needs good results from some of those trials. A frequent refrain voiced the need for clear data on clinical outcome that makes it easy to show a superior benefit for patients compared to what’s available today.

Our President and CEO Randal Mills led off the second day of the event with a discussion of the restructuring of our grant making process that he refers to as “CIRM 2.0.” His goal is to cut the time from eligibility to submit a grant to the time it is awarded from the current average of 22 months to just 81 days. The concept created an immediate buzz in the room that lasted through lunch three hours later.

But as Randy likes to say, “It is all about the patients.” He noted in his presentation that in his prior position, working on a stem cell therapy for pediatric Graft Versus Host Disease—a horrible deadly complication that strikes half of kids getting bone marrow transplants for cancer—that extra 20 months equals another 750 dying kids.

Everyone here seemed to be in sync on reducing the time to develop therapies. If someone produced a word map of the event, “accelerate” would be large and near the middle as one of the most spoken words.

Don Gibbons