June 29, 2010

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the State’s stem cell funding agency created by Proposition 71, has awarded $25 million to 19 projects focused on solving immune rejection of transplanted stem cells. Stanford University, the Universities of California, San Francisco, Berkeley and Davis combined received the majority of the funding, $13.73M. The Palo Alto Institute for Research and Education Inc. was awarded $885,475.

Stem cell transplantation has actually been going on for 50 years in the form of bone marrow transplants, said Jan Nolta Director of the Institute for Regenerative Cures, at the University of California, Davis (UCD) facility in Sacramento. “People don’t realize those are stem cells,” she said. Despite the long history of stem cell transplantation there are still a lot of problems with the practice, Nolta said. In order for the body to accept the stem cells physicians usually have to knock out the patient’s white blood cells and that puts them at risk of infection. Plus the patients have to take immunosuppressive drugs for life to prevent rejection.

UCD received a CIRM grant for $1.3 million for dermatology professor William Murphy’s research to improve the safety and efficacy of stem cell transplantation, which would hopefully help with heart, lung and other solid organ transplants as well as cancer treatments.

Murphy is doing research on what he calls “natural-killer cells” which are injected from a donor to the patient and kill the patient’s immune cells so that there are no immunological attacks on tissues and organs. It allows donor cells to graft in the host’s body without the need of drugs to suppress immune system responses.

In February UCD celebrated the opening of its $63 million Institute for Regenerative Cures. CIRM provided $20 million of that funding. The center includes a Good Manufacturing Practice Facility for Cellular Therapies to process and test stem cell lines for research. It’s one of only two in California, the other is in Los Angeles. And there are less than 10 in the country, Nolta said. Now Stanford and other UC campuses are using the facility to process stem cell lines for their research.

Of the Northern California universities receiving CIRM grant money this time around, Stanford claimed the largest slice, $5.7 million. The University of California, San Francisco got $3.8 million and UC Berkeley received $2 million.

UCD has clinical trials underway applying stem cell therapies to heart attacks and bone repair and hopes to start clinical trials later this year or in 2011 for peripheral vascular disease in diabetics and retinal occlusion, Nolta said.

“In writing proposition 71, we anticipated the need to overcome the immune response in order to fulfill one of the ultimate promises of regenerative medicine, replacing or repairing tissues with stem cells,” said Robert Klein, chair of the CIRM Governing Board,” in a press release.

Nobody knows when we’ll see some of these therapies starting to be used on patients, but already scientists are able to take pieces of a person’s skin and use those cells to grow a portion of a liver.

“I don’t think it will be that far off. It sounds like science fiction, but we understand all the steps,” Nolta said.