The Burrill Report

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine approved $150 million in grants to fund translational research aimed at moving promising therapies from the lab to human clinical trials.

The grants, which are up to $20 million each, will fund research teams in both industry and academia working on projects the institute has deemed to represent the best possible chances of producing therapies for deadly and disabling diseases and disorders. The projects that garnered funding include ones aimed at developing new treatments for Huntington’s disease, metastatic melanoma, osteoporosis, critical limb ischemia, spinal cord injury, cardiovascular disease, and ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

The funding is part of the stem cell agency’s Disease Team II awards, which are designed to encourage multidisciplinary teams of researchers from academic institutions, medical centers, and industry to work together and to develop new treatments for a broad range of therapies. The recipients were selected from 21 applications, all of which were reviewed by an independent group of internationally renowned scientists.
“Everything we do in this innovative Disease Team program is focused on getting good science converted to productive treatments for patients,” says Alan Trounson, president of the institute. “These awards reflect and highlight our commitment to identifying the most promising stem cell research and supporting it for the time needed to show both the safety and effectiveness of therapy, with an ultimate goal of producing a new treatment that is approved by the FDA for clinical application.”

The teams that are being given the funding are expected to file a request to begin clinical trials or to complete early- or mid-stage clinical trials within four years. Five of the teams propose to finish a clinical trial within the period of the award.

Two of CIRM's 20 collaborative funding partners around the world will also be contributing to this round of projects. An investigator at the National Institutes of Health will be a partner Principal Investigator with the University of California Los Angeles team developing a therapy for metastatic melanoma; and the Andalusian Initiative for Advanced Therapies in Spain will provide $1.6 million to researchers there to collaborate with the team at the University of California Davis working on a therapy for limb ischemia.


July 27, 2012
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-california%e2%80%99s_stem_cell_agency_approves_150_million_grants.html