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. Goal #3 was Discover.

When journalists write about science a lot of the attention is often focused on clinical trials. It’s not too surprising, that’s the stage where you see if treatments really work in people and not just in the lab. But long before you get to the clinical trial stage there’s a huge amount of work that has to be done. The starting point for that work is in the Discovery stage, if it works there it moves to the Translational stage, and only after that, assuming it’s still looking promising, does it start thinking about moving into the clinic.

The Discovery, or basic, stage of research is where ideas are tested to see if they have any promise and have the potential to lead to the development of a therapy or device that could ultimately help patients. In many ways the goal of Discovery research is to gain a better understanding of how, in our case, stem cells work, and how to harness that power to treat particular diseases or disorders.

Without a rigorous Discovery research program you can’t begin to create a pipeline of promising projects that you can advance towards patients. And of course having a strong Discovery program is not much use if you don’t have somewhere for those projects to advance to, namely Translational and ultimately clinical.

So, when we were laying out our Strategic Plan goals back in 2015 we wanted to create a pipeline for all three programs, moving the most promising ones forward. So we set an ambitious goal.

Introduce 50 new therapeutic or device candidates into development.

Now this doesn’t mean just fund 50 projects hoping to develop a new therapy or device. A lot of studies that are funded, particularly at the earliest stages, have a good idea that just doesn’t pan out. In fact one quite common definition of early research – in this case from Translational Medicine Communications – is “the earliest stage of research, conducted for the advancement of knowledge, often without any concern for its practical applications.

That’s not what we wanted. We aren’t in this to do research just for its own sake. We fund research because we want it to lead somewhere, we want it to have a practical application. We want to fund projects that actually ended up with something much more promising, a candidate that might actually work and was ready to move into the next level of research to test it further.

And we almost, almost made it to the 50-candidate goal. We got to 46 and almost certainly would have made it to 50 if we hadn’t run out of money. Even so, that’s pretty impressive. There are now 46 projects ready to move on, or are already moving on, to the next level of research.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that these will ultimately end up as an FDA-approved therapy or device. But if you don’t set goals, you’ll never score. And now, thanks to the passage of Proposition 14, we have a chance to support those projects as they move forward.