CIRM issued a press release (PR) a few days ago unveiling CIRM 2.0, a new form of the agency and funding of novel efforts.
The PR focused on action by its Governing Board to fund three Alpha Clinic programs for $8 million each at City of Hope (LA), UCLA, and UCSD. The Alpha Clinics will make a huge difference in moving clinical stem cell research forward.
The only potential hiccup in this exciting development is that the three Alpha Clinics are all within a very short distance from each other in Southern California, unfortunately leaving Central and Northern California potentially without any CIRM Alpha Clinics at all.
When I first proposed the idea of CIRM 2.0, I envisioned a form of CIRM that had a streamlined focus on clinical translation, but a continued commitment to training and the stem cell community. We can see that a trend toward that coming to life under Randy Mills’ leadership. I hope to have an interview with him soon on his vision for the future of CIRM and the stem cell field.
From this CIRM PR, I’m glad to see that the Bridges Program will continue as that is something that I’ve advocated for recently. It’d be great on the training front if the CIRM T32 training programs could also be continued, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Overall, CIRM 2.0 is a very positive step from the California stem cell agency.
Here is the text of the CIRM PR:
Stem Cell Agency Unveils CIRM 2.0 – its Aggressive Plan to Significantly Accelerate Promising Therapies. Invests $24 Million To Create Alpha Clinic Network
October 23, 2014
Los Angeles, CA – The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state’s Stem Cell Agency, today took two important steps towards speeding up the development of effective treatments for patients in need.
First, C. Randal Mills, Ph.D., the agency’s President & CEO, unveiled the Agency’s plans for CIRM 2.0, detailing an approach that would dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to approve funding for a potential therapy heading into a clinical trial.
“Right now it can take almost two years for a promising idea to go from the application to the final funding stage. That’s just unacceptable,” says Mills. “We are going to shorten that to just 120 days. But we’re not just making it faster, we’re also making it easier for companies or institutions with a therapy that is ready to go into clinical trials to be able to get funding for their project when they need it. Under this new system they will be able to apply anytime, and not have to try and shoehorn their needs into our application process.”
Mills says the more streamlined process will start with projects ready for clinical trials but, with Board approval, a variation on the process will eventually be extended to all other areas of research that the Agency funds.
“Speeding up the process is only one part of CIRM 2.0,” says Mills. “We also want a process that ultimately delivers higher quality programs. The goal is not just faster but also better investments that have the greatest opportunity to provide patients with effective treatments.”
The Agency’s governing Board also voted to award $24 million to set up three new clinical trial centers. The awards, part of the Agency’s Alpha Stem Cell Clinics program, are to create one-stop centers for clinical trials enabling patients to have safe, fast and easy access to life-saving or life-changing stem cell therapies.
“Everything we do has one simple goal, to accelerate the development of successful treatments for people in need,” says Mills. “Stem cell therapies are a new way of treating disease; instead of managing symptoms, cellular medicine has the power to replace or regenerate damaged tissues and organs. And so we need to explore new and innovative ways of accelerating clinical research with stem cells. That is what we hope these Alpha Stem Cell Clinics will accomplish.”
The clinics will be centers of excellence that will not only have the clinical and regulatory expertise needed to deliver what, in many cases, will be the first-in-human clinical trials, but will also have the trained personnel, state of the art facilities and the support, patient care coordination and long-term follow-up that these therapies need.
The awards of $8 million each go to the City of Hope near Los Angeles, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Diego.
The Board also voted to continue funding for another year the Creativity Awards and the CIRM Bridges to Stem Cell Research Awards programs. The Creativity program gives high school students, many from poor and low-income communities, a paid summer internship to help introduce them to stem cell research. The Bridges program offers research and training opportunities for undergraduate or Master’s level students to develop a skilled workforce for stem cell research in California.