University of California Irvine

CIRM Funded Trial for Parkinson’s Treats First Patient

/ Yimy Villa / Leave a comment
Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz

Brain Neurotherapy Bio, Inc. (BNB) is pleased to announce the treatment of the first patient in its Parkinson’s gene therapy study.  The CIRM-funded study, led by Dr. Krystof Bankiewicz, is one of the 64 clinical trials funded by the California state agency to date.

Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that affects one million people in the U.S alone and leads to shaking, stiffness, and problems with walking, balance, and coordination.  It is caused by the breakdown and death of dopaminergic neurons, special nerve cells in the brain responsible for the production of dopamine, a chemical messenger that is crucial for normal brain activity.

The patient was treated at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center with a gene therapy designed 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 treatment seeks to increase dopamine production in the brain, alleviating Parkinson’s symptoms and potentially slowing down the disease progress.

“We are pleased to support this multi-institution California collaboration with Ohio State to take a novel first-in-human gene therapy into a clinical trial for Parkinson’s Disease.” says Maria T. Millan, M.D., President and CEO of CIRM.  “This is the culmination of years of scientific research by the Bankiewicz team to improve upon previous attempts to translate the potential therapeutic effect of GDNF to the neurons damaged in the disease. We join the Parkinson’s community in following the outcome of this vital research opportunity.”

CIRM Board Member and patient advocate David Higgins, Ph.D. is also excited about this latest development.  For Dr. Higgins, advocating for Parkinson’s is a very personal journey since he, his grandmother, and his uncle were diagnosed with the disease.

“Our best chance for developing better treatments for Parkinson’s is to test as many logical approaches as possible. CIRM encourages out-of-the-box thinking by providing funding for novel approaches. The Parkinson’s community is a-buzz with excitement about the GDNF approach and looks to CIRM to identify, fund, and promote these kinds of programs.”

In a news release Dr. Sandra Kostyk, director of the Movement Disorders Division at Ohio State Wexner Medical Center said this approach involves infusing a gene therapy solution deep into a part of the brain affected by Parkinson’s: “This is a onetime treatment strategy that could have ongoing lifelong benefits. Though it’s hoped that this treatment will slow disease progression, we don’t expect this strategy to completely stop or cure all aspects of the disease. We’re cautiously optimistic as this research effort moves forward.” 

Other trial sites located in California that are currently recruiting patients are the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Specifically, the Irvine trial site is using the UCI Alpha Stem Cell Clinic, one of five leading medical centers throughout California that make up the CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinic (ASSC) Network.  The ASSC Network specializes in the delivery of stem cell therapies by providing world-class, state of the art infrastructure to support clinical research.

For more information on the trial and enrollment eligibility, you can directly contact the study coordinators by email at the trial sites listed:

  1. The Ohio State University: OSUgenetherapyresearch@osumc.edu
  2. University of California, San Francisco: GDNF@ucsf.edu
  3. University of California, Irvine: chewbc@hs.uci.edu

Rare Disease Gets Big Boost from California’s Stem Cell Agency

/ Kevin McCormack / 4 Comments
UC Irvine’s Dr. Leslie Thompson and patient advocate Frances Saldana after the CIRM Board vote to approve funding for Huntington’s disease

If you were looking for a poster child for an unmet medical need Huntington’s disease (HD) would be high on the list. It’s a devastating disease that attacks the brain, steadily destroying the ability to control body movement and speech. It impairs thinking and often leads to dementia. It’s always fatal and there are no treatments that can stop or reverse the course of the disease. Today the Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) voted to support a project that shows promise in changing that.

The Board voted to approve $6 million to enable Dr. Leslie Thompson and her team at the University of California, Irvine to do the late stage testing needed to apply to the US Food and Drug Administration for permission to start a clinical trial in people. The therapy involves transplanting stem cells that have been turned into neural stem cells which secrete a molecule called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which has been shown to promote the growth and improve the function of brain cells. The goal is to slow down the progression of this debilitating disease.

“Huntington’s disease affects around 30,000 people in the US and children born to parents with HD have a 50/50 chance of getting the disease themselves,” says Dr. Maria T. Millan, the President and CEO of CIRM. “We have supported Dr. Thompson’s work for a number of years, reflecting our commitment to helping the best science advance, and are hopeful today’s vote will take it a crucial step closer to a clinical trial.”

Another project supported by CIRM at an earlier stage of research was also given funding for a clinical trial.

The Board approved almost $12 million to support a clinical trial to help people undergoing a kidney transplant. Right now, there are around 100,000 people in the US waiting to get a kidney transplant. Even those fortunate enough to get one face a lifetime on immunosuppressive drugs to stop the body rejecting the new organ, drugs that increase the risk for infection, heart disease and diabetes.  

Dr. Everett Meyer, and his team at Stanford University, will use a combination of healthy donor stem cells and the patient’s own regulatory T cells (Tregs), to train the patient’s immune system to accept the transplanted kidney and eliminate the need for immunosuppressive drugs.

The initial group targeted in this clinical trial are people with what are called HLA-mismatched kidneys. This is where the donor and recipient do not share the same human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), proteins located on the surface of immune cells and other cells in the body. Around 50 percent of patients with HLA-mismatched transplants experience rejection of the organ.

In his application Dr. Meyer said they have a simple goal: “The goal is “one kidney for life” off drugs with safety for all patients. The overall health status of patients off immunosuppressive drugs will improve due to reduction in side effects associated with these drugs, and due to reduced graft loss afforded by tolerance induction that will prevent chronic rejection.”

Cell mate: the man who makes stem cells for clinical trials

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

When we announced that one of the researchers we fund – Dr. Henry Klassen at the University of California, Irvine – has begun his clinical trial to treat the vision-destroying disease retinitis pigmentosa, we celebrated the excitement felt by the researchers and the hope from people with the disease.

But we missed out one group. The people who make the cells that are being used in the treatment. That’s like praising a champion racecar driver for their skill and expertise, and forgetting to mention the people who built the car they drive.

Prof. Gerhard Bauer

Prof. Gerhard Bauer

In this case the “car” was built by the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) team, led by Prof. Gerhard Bauer, at the University of California Davis (UC Davis).

Turns out that Gerhard and his team have been involved in more than just one clinical trial and that the work they do is helping shape stem cell research around the U.S. So we decided to get the story behind this work straight from the horse’s mouth (and if you want to know why that’s a particularly appropriate phrase to use here read this previous blog about the origins of GMP)

When did the GMP facility start, what made you decide this was needed at UC Davis?

Gerhard: In 2006 the leadership of the UC Davis School of Medicine decided that it would be important for UC Davis to have a large enough manufacturing facility for cellular and gene therapy products, as this would be the only larger academic GMP facility in Northern CA, creating an important resource for academia and also industry. So, we started planning the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures and large GMP facility with a team of facility planners, architects and scientists, and by 2007 we had our designs ready and applied for the CIRM major facilities grant, one of the first big grants CIRM offered. We were awarded the grant and started construction in 2008. We opened the Institute and GMP facility in April of 2010.

How does it work? Do you have a number of different cell lines you can manufacture or do people come to you with cell lines they want in large numbers?

Gerhard: We perform client driven manufacturing, which means the clients tell us what they need manufactured. We will, in conjunction with the client, obtain the starting product, for instance cells that need to undergo a manufacturing process to become the final product. These cells can be primary cells or also cell lines. Cell lines may perhaps be available commercially, but often it is necessary to derive the primary cell product here in the GMP facility; this can, for instance, be done from whole donor bone marrow, from apheresis peripheral blood cells, from skin cells, etc.

How many cells would a typical – if there is such a thing – order request?

Gerhard: This depends on the application and can range from 1 million cells to several billions of cells. For instance, for an eye clinical trial using autologous (from the patient themselves) hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, a small number, such as a million cells may be sufficient. For allogeneic (from an unrelated donor) cell banks that are required to treat many patients in a clinical trial, several billion cells would be needed. We therefore need to be able to immediately and adequately adjust to the required manufacturing scale.

Why can’t researchers just make their own cells in their own lab or company?

Gerhard: For clinical trial products, there are different, higher, standards than apply for just research laboratory products. There are federal regulations that guide the manufacturing of products used in clinical trials, in this special case, cellular products. In order to produce such products, Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) rules and regulations, and guidelines laid down by both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the United States Pharmacopeia need to be followed.

The goal is to manufacture a safe, potent and non-contaminated product that can be safely used in people. If researchers would like to use the cells or cell lines they developed in a clinical trial they have to go to a GMP manufacturer so these products can actually be used clinically. If, however, they have their own GMP facility they can make those products in house, provided of course they adhere to the rules and regulations for product manufacturing under GMP conditions.

Besides the UC Irvine retinitis pigmentosa trial now underway what other kinds of clinical trials have you supplied cells for?

Gerhard: A UC Davis sponsored clinical trial in collaboration with our Eye Center for the treatment of blindness (NCT01736059), which showed remarkable vision recovery in two out of the six patients who have been treated to date (Park et al., PMID:25491299, ), and also an industry sponsored clinical gene therapy trial for severe kidney disease. Besides cellular therapy products, we also manufacture clinical grade gene therapy vectors and specialty drug formulations.

For several years we have been supplying clinicians with a UC Davis GMP facility developed formulation of the neuroactive steroid “allopregnanolone” that was shown to act on resident neuronal stem cells. We saved several lives of patients with intractable seizures, and the formulation is also applied in clinical trials for the treatment of traumatic brain injury, Fragile X syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease.

What kinds of differences are you seeing in the industry, in the kinds of requests you get now compared to when you started?

Gerhard: In addition, gene therapy vector manufacturing and formulation work is really needed by several clients. One of the UC Davis specialties is “next generation” gene-modified mesenchymal stem cells, and we are contacted often to develop those products.

Where will we be in five years?

Gerhard: Most likely, some of the Phase I/II clinical trials (these are early stage clinical trials with, usually, relatively small numbers of patients involved) will have produced encouraging results, and product manufacturing will need to be scaled up to provide enough cellular products for Phase III clinical trials (much larger trials with many more people) and later for a product that can be licensed and marketed.

We are already working with companies that anticipate such scale up work and transitioning into manufacturing for marketing; we are planning this upcoming process with them. We also believe that certain cellular products will replace currently available standard medical treatments as they may turn out to produce superior results.

What does the public not know about the work you do that you think they should know?

Gerhard: The public should know that UC Davis has the largest academic Good Manufacturing Practice Facility in Northern California, that its design was well received by the FDA, that we are manufacturing a wide variety of products – currently about 16 – that we are capable of manufacturing several products at one time without interfering with each other, and that we are happy to work with clients from both academia and private industry through both collaborative and Fee-for-Service arrangements.

We are also very proud to have, during the last 5 years, contributed to saving several lives with some of the novel products we manufactured. And, of course, we are extremely grateful to CIRM for building this state-of-the-art facility.

You can see a video about the building of the GMP facility at UC Davis here.

Da Mayor and the clinical trial that could help save his vision

/ Kevin McCormack / 1 Comment

Former San Francisco Mayor and California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown is many things, but shy is not one of them. A profile of him in the San Francisco Chronicle once described him as “Brash, smart, confident”. But for years Da Mayor – as he is fondly known in The City – said very little about a condition that is slowly destroying his vision. Mayor Brown has retinitis pigmentosa (RP).

RP is a degenerative disease that slowly destroys a person’s sight vision by attacking and destroying photoreceptors in the retina, the light-sensitive area at the back of the eye that is critical for vision. At a recent conference held by the Everylife Foundation for Rare Diseases, Mayor Brown gave the keynote speech and talked about his life with RP.

Willie Brown

He described how people thought he was being rude because he would walk by them on the streets and not say hello. The truth is, he couldn’t see them.

He was famous for driving fancy cars like Bentleys, Maseratis and Ferraris. When he stopped doing that, he said, “people thought I was broke because I no longer had expensive cars.” The truth is his vision was too poor for him to drive.

Despite its impact on his life RP hasn’t slowed Da Mayor down, but now there’s a new clinical trial underway that might help him, and others like him, regain some of that lost vision.

The trial is the work of Dr. Henry Klassen at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Dr. Klassen just announced the treatment of their first four patients, giving them stem cells that hopefully will slow down or even reverse the progression of RP.

“We are delighted to be moving into the clinic after many years of bench research,” Klassen said in a news release.

The patients were each given a single injection of retinal progenitor cells. It’s hoped these cells will help protect the photoreceptors in the retina that have not yet been damaged by RP, and even revive those that have become impaired but not yet destroyed by the disease.

The trial will enroll 16 patients in this Phase 1 trial. They will all get a single injection of retinal cells into the eye most affected by the disease. After that, they’ll be followed for 12 months to make sure that the therapy is safe and to see if it has any beneficial effects on vision in the treated eye, compared to the untreated one.

In a news release Jonathan Thomas, Ph.D., J.D., Chair of the CIRM Board said it’s always exciting when a therapy moves out of the lab and into people:

“This is an important step for Dr. Klassen and his team, and hopefully an even more important one for people battling this devastating disease. Our mission at CIRM is to accelerate the development of stem cell therapies for patients with unmet medical needs, and this certainly fits that bill. That’s why we have invested almost $19 million in helping this therapy reach this point.”

RP hasn’t defeated Da Mayor. Willie Brown is still known as a sharp dresser and an even sharper political mind. His message to the people at the Everylife Foundation conference was, “never give up, keep striving, keep pushing, keep hoping.”

To learn more about the study or to enroll contact the UCI Alpha Stem Cell Clinic at 949-824-3990 or by email at stemcell@uci.edu.

And visit our website to watch a presentation about the trial (link) by Dr. Klassen and to hear brief remarks from one of his patients.

A hopeful sight: therapy for vision loss cleared for clinical trial

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

Rosalinda Barrero

Rosalinda Barrero, has retinitis pigmentosa

Rosalinda Barrero says people often thought she was rude, or a snob, because of the way she behaved, pretending not to see them or ignoring them on the street. The truth is Rosalinda has retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a nasty disease, one that often attacks early in life and slowly destroys a person’s vision. Rosalinda’s eyes look normal but she can see almost nothing.

“I’ve lived my whole life with this. I told my daughters [as a child] I didn’t like to go Trick or Treating at Halloween because I couldn’t see. I’d trip; I’d loose my candy. I just wanted to stay home.”

Rosalinda says she desperately wants a treatment:

“Because I’m a mom and I would be so much a better mom if I could see. I could drive my daughters around. I want to do my part as a mom.”

Now a promising therapy for RP, funded by the stem cell agency, has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start a clinical trial in people.

The therapy was developed by Dr. Henry Klassen at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). RP is a relatively rare, inherited condition in which the light-sensitive cells at the back of the retina, cells that are essential for vision, slowly and progressively degenerate. Eventually it can result in blindness. There is no cure and no effective long-term treatment.

Dr. Klassen’s team will inject patients with stem cells, known as retinal progenitors, to help replace those cells destroyed by the disease and hopefully to save those not yet damaged.

In a news release about the therapy Dr. Klassen said the main goal of this small Phase I trial will be to make sure this approach is safe:

“This milestone is a very important one for our project. It signals a turning point, marking the beginning of the clinical phase of development, and we are all very excited about this project.”

Jonathan Thomas, the Chair of our Board, says that CIRM has invested almost $20 million to help support this work through early stage research and now, into the clinic.

“One of the goals of the agency is to provide the support that promising therapies need to progress and ultimately to get into clinical trials in patients. RP affects about 1.5 million people worldwide and is the leading cause of inherited blindness in the developed world. Having an effective treatment for it would transform people’s lives in extraordinary ways.”

Dr. Klassen says without that support it is doubtful that this work would have progressed as quickly as it has. And the support doesn’t just involve money:

“CIRM has played a critical and essential role in this project. While the funding is extremely important, CIRM also tutors and guides its grantees in the many aspects of translational development at every step of the way, and this accelerates during the later pre-clinical phase where much is at stake.”

This is now the 12th project that we are funding that has been approved by the FDA for clinical trials. It’s cause for optimism, but cautious optimism. These are small scale, early phase trials that in many cases are the first time these therapies have been tested in people. They look promising in the lab. Now it’s time to see if they are equally promising in people.

Considering we didn’t really start funding research until 2007 we have come a long way in a short time. Clearly we still have a long way to go. But the news that Dr. Klassen’s work has been given the go-ahead to take the next, big step, is a hopeful sign for Rosalinda and others with RP that we are at least heading in the right direction.

One of our recent Spotlight on Disease videos features Dr. Klassen and Rosalinda Barrero talking about RP.

This work will be one of the clinical trials being tested in our new Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network. You can read more about that network here.

Using stem cells to mend a broken heart and winning $6,000 to boot

/ Kevin McCormack / Leave a comment

It’s no secret that the members of the CIRM blog team are all big fans of scientists who are good public communicators. We feel that the more scientists talk about their research, the better the public will understand the importance of science and it’s ability to help them or someone they love.

Grad Slam winner, Ashley Fong from UC Irvine

Grad Slam winner, Ashley Fong from UC Irvine

So on Monday when University of California, Irvine researcher Ashley Fong won the $6,000 top prize in the Grad Slam competition for the terrific explanation of her work in using stem cells to treat heart disease, it was doubly gratifying. You see, not only is Ashley a great communicator, but she’s also someone we have helped support in her career.

The Grad Slam is an “elevator pitch” competition sponsored by the University of California Office of the President. Ten graduate students from across the UC system were given three minutes to explain their work to a live audience, using everyday language and avoiding jargon or technical lingo.

All the students were good. Ashley was great. Want proof? Here you go (Ashley comes on at 39.20 into the video.)

She says she discovered her passion for stem cell research thanks to a CIRM-funded summer undergraduate internship. Now she is working in the lab of Chris Hughes at UCI.

In a UCI News story about the competition Frances Leslie, dean of the Graduate Division who hosted the campus-level competition in April, said:

“It’s important for graduate students to explain their research to the general public in ways that are easy to understand. And it’s also critical for the taxpayers of California to see the benefits of their support of graduate education.”

We couldn’t have put it any better.