Taking root: Stem cell therapies making progress
By: John Upton
October 30, 2008
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| Stem cell research is taking off, four years after the passage of a state measure to finance it. (Cindy Chew/The Examiner) |
SAN FRANCISCO — On a single floor in a San Francisco office building, 32 state employees are guiding a multibillion-dollar medical revolution that could see new therapies for vexing, debilitating inflictions such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes and spinal cord injuries within the next decade.
It has been four years since California voters approved a ballot measure that provided $3 billion in funding for stem cell research, and state officials say the funding has accelerated research that could one day offer therapies and cures for more than 70 incurable diseases and injuries.
“The field is moving much more quickly than most of us had thought,” said Arnold Kriegstein, who oversees stem cell research at UC San Francisco.
The passage of Proposition 71 also created the state’s stem cell headquarters, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, or CIRM, which is charged with dispersing the voter-approved money and therefore directing stem cell research in the state.
In 2005, San Francisco was chosen as the site for the CIRM, beating out San Diego, Sacramento and Emeryville with a competitive $18 million offer that included free office space at 250 King St. Since then, a biotechnology hub has taken root just south of the institute, in the Mission Bay neighborhood. Built around a new UCSF campus, dozens of biotech companies have flocked to the formerly vacant land.
“Having them in Mission Bay totally reinforces the idea that San Francisco is sort of the epicenter of biotech,” said Michael Cohen, director of The City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. “It’s going to be over many years that they’re granting out money.”
To date, the CIRM governing board has doled out research and facility grants totaling more than $614 million, one-sixth of which — $101 million — has gone to UCSF and the San Francisco-based J. David Gladstone Institutes, records show. Nearby Stanford University has received $93.9 million, more than any other institution in the state.
Four new stem cell research buildings in the Bay Area are now under construction, partly funded by the CIRM, according to the institute’s chief scientist, Marie Csete.
The facilities — based at UCSF’s Parnassus campus, UC Berkeley, Stanford and the Buck Institute for Age Research, a Novato nonprofit — will become “critical-mass areas” for stem cell biologists that will speed the progress of the research being done, Csete said.
“It’s an accelerant to have the biologists housed in areas where they can step out of their labs and talk to people of various disciplines,” she said.
The institute’s grants are helping to draw stem cell scientists from around the world to California — and helping lure scientists into the field from other disciplines, according to Csete.
The growing momentum is helping the institute identify and tackle bottlenecks to the development of stem cell therapies — such as the long time it takes to create large batches of stem cells — in hopes of developing uses for stem cells that can “make a difference in patients’ lives” within five years, she said.
“We’re making a fairly aggressive challenge to our applicants to do all the research necessary to get to the point where they would be ready to talk to the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] about a clinical trial,” Csete said. “It’s an exciting time.”
Ailments that might see stem cell-based therapies developed within five years include Type 1 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and
spinal-cord injuries, according to Csete.
State funding bolsters S.F. research facilities
With funding from the state’s stem cell agency, research is under way at two organizations in The City: UC San Francisco and the J. David Gladstone Institutes, in Mission Bay.
Construction of a new laboratory building is in progress at UCSF to house 25 of the university’s 70 stem cell investigators and their teams of researchers. They currently work in Mission Bay and at the main building at the Parnassus campus.
The 67,000-square-foot building, built into the hillside at the university’s Parnassus campus, is expected to be ready by 2010.
UCSF has been awarded $82.4 million in 29 grants from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s stem cell agency. The university’s $123 million building is being partly funded with a $34.9 million CIRM grant, according to UCSF officials.
The nonprofit J. David Gladstone Institutes, a collection of research institutions that focus on heart disease, brain disease, viruses and immune systems, has been awarded 11 CIRM grants totaling $18.8 million.
Gubernatorial veto killed bipartisan legislation
A bill that would have required that treatments or therapies funded by the state’s taxpayer-supported stem cell agency be made available to uninsured Californians was vetoed last month by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The bipartisan bill — which passed the state Senate 37-1 and the Assembly 64-7, also would have eliminated the priority the state’s stem cell institute gives to funding embryonic stem cell research.
In his Sept. 27 veto message, the governor said the requirement to make state-funded treatments affordable would have placed an “unnecessary restriction” on the ability of the agency’s governing board to adopt regulations on the intellectual property resulting from the funding “that balance patient need and essential medical research.”
Schwarzenegger also said the bill undermined the “express intent” of voters who passed Proposition 71.
“They wanted to fund embryonic stem cell research that the federal government wouldn’t,” the governor wrote.
Top scientists in the Bay Area making strides
Breakthrough
In late 2007, J. David Gladstone Institutes researcher Shinya Yamanaka was one of several scientists who helped revolutionize the field of stem cell research by discovering a way of using a person’s DNA to create a cell that acts and looks like an embryonic stem cell.
Embryonic stem cells previously were harvested exclusively from embryos, and the discovery helps scientists sidestep ethical opposition to their research from religious leaders and activists who consider an embryo to be a human life.
The breakthrough is also opening the door for individualized stem cell treatments that are tailored to an individual’s illness.
Fertility treatment
Only 50 to 60 percent of all conceptions advance beyond 20 weeks. Discovering ways of identifying which embryos are likely to survive and which are likely to fail would be a boon for fertility treatments.
UCSF researcher Susan Fisher is one of the scientific leaders working with stem cells to better understand how different sections of young embryos develop, which is expected to help fertility doctors eventually distinguish between healthy and unhealthy embryos before they are planted inside a patient.
Heart-drug safety
Beating fragments of human hearts have been created by Gladstone Institutes researcher Bruce Conklin and his team to develop new tests for the safety of heart
medication.
Drugs for heart conditions, such as arrhythmia, are currently tested first on animals and then on humans.
Within a few years, Conklin’s work could allow drug developers to bypass both of those steps by testing the effects of their medication on rows of custom-made heart components that are genetically identical to the patient seeking treatment, he said.
“We’d like to be able to use these heart cells as a way to test drugs before they get out in the market,” Conklin said. — John Upton
Voter-approved stem cell funding throughout the state
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has approved 229 research and facility grants — totaling $614.3 million — since its 2005 inception.
| Institution | Research grants | Facility grants | Total grants | Funds | |
| Stanford University | 30 | 2 | 32 | $93,896,310 | |
| UC San Francisco | 27 | 2 | 29 | $82,378,058 | |
| UCLA | 19 | 2 | 31 | $51,315,992 | |
| UC Irvine | 16 | 2 | 18 | $51,228,810 | |
| USC | 12 | 2 | 14 | $48,467,604 | |
| San Diego Consortium | 0 | 1 | 1 | $43,000,000 | |
| UC Davis | 7 | 2 | 9 | $35,766,586 | |
| UC San Diego | 18 | 1 | 19 | $32,853,328 | |
| UC Berkeley | 5 | 2 | 7 | $29,454,489 | |
| Buck Institute | 2 | 2 | 4 | $25,429,364 | |
| Gladstone Institutes | 10 | 1 | 11 | $18,787,142 | |
| UC Santa Cruz | 5 | 2 | 7 | $16,573,636 | |
| The Burnham Institute | 12 | 1 | 13 | $18,180,796 | |
| The Salk Institute | 9 | 1 | 10 | $16,036,730 | |
| CHLA | 5 | 1 | 6 | $11,701,083 | |
| Scripps | 4 | 1 | 5 | $9,317,989 | |
| UC Merced | 3 | 1 | 3 | $8,010,498 | |
| UC Santa Barbara | 1 | 2 | 3 | $6,687,931 | |
| UC Riverside | 3 | 1 | 4 | $6,055,762 | |
| Ludwig | 3 | 1 | 4 | $2,473,053 | |
| CalTech | 1 | 0 | 1 | $2,071,823 | |
| City of Hope | 3 | 0 | 3 | $2,036,042 | |
| San Diego State | 1 | 0 | 1 | $1,725,830 | |
| HBMRI | 1 | 0 | 1 | $714,654 | |
| CHORI | 1 | 0 | 1 | $55,000 | |
| Novocell Inc. | 1 | 0 | 1 | $48,950 | |
| Cedars Sinai | 1 | 0 | 1 | $46,886 | |
| Total | 200 | 29 | 229 | $614,314,346 | |
Source: California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
