'Nature' Assesses CIRM, Warns of Conflicts of Interest

Nature magazine took a run at the California stem cell agency today, producing a fine overview and an editorial that warned of "cronyism" on its board of directors.

The occasion for the coverage is the upcoming approval next week of $262 million in funding for stem cell lab construction, an event that is likely to trigger a number of articles about CIRM in the California media and perhaps nationally.

The article by Erika Check Hayden recapped the history of tiny organization (staff about 26) and said,

"If $3 billion seemed like a dream four years ago, it is now a reality that is changing not only the way science is done in California, but is resonating across the US biomedical landscape."

Nature highlighted some of the conflict of interest problems on the Oversight Committee, as CIRM's board of directors is known. Its editorial said,

"Several episodes over the past year have highlighted an inherent problem with the CIRM's structure: the board that distributes its funding is stacked with representatives from the universities that benefit most from those disbursements. The CIRM has enacted rules to try to limit the conflicts of interest posed by this arrangement. They don't go far enough. At one meeting in January, for instance, CIRM board members from institutions that had applied for a facilities grant voted to deny one of these grants to an institution that has no representatives on the CIRM board."

The editorial continued,

"For the agency to succeed, patient advocates and other public representatives must fight the tendency of the academic institutions on the board to hoard dollars. As the patient advocates grow into their roles as full partners, and with help from well-intentioned lawmakers such as (State Sen. Sheila)Kuehl, the CIRM must be coaxed into serving its most important constituency — the taxpayers of California. The roles themselves are not unusual in the world of governance, but here the stakes are exceptionally high."

Hayden's overview said,

"...(E)ven as the agency is changing California's scientific outlook, it is also facing pressure to prove its worth to voters — and to show that it can deliver the medical and economic benefits it promised in order to convince taxpayers to fund it in the first place. Which raises the biggest question about the CIRM: will scientists be able to deliver the results it promised? This is an urgent concern for the leaders of the CIRM, because it won the hearts of California voters by saying it would produce cures for a number of debilitating diseases."

Hayden discussed legislation by Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, as one of the responses to the questions about delivering on Prop. 71 campaign promises.

Hayden also wrote about the recent complaints that CIRM overstated its funding role in UCSD research that has led to clinical trials and about the conflict-of-interest flap involving CIRM director John Reed. Both cases were first reported by the California Stem Cell Report, a fact that Nature did not mention, but media coverage of CIRM was incidental to the article.

Hayden continued:

"...CIRM's structure has, at times, seemed to hamper its own mission. That was painfully evident at a meeting in January, when one doctor found himself begging for funding from 13 board members who were competing directly against him for money."

As we reported in January, Bert Lubin(see photo), head of the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, unsuccessfully appealed a negative recommendation by scientific reviewers to the full Oversight Committee, which has final say on grants. (The committee has reversed a positive recommendation for funding once (Sept. 9,2005) and never reversed, as far as we can recall, a do-not-fund decision by scientific reviewers.)

Lubin told Nature,

"We're not in the 'in' crowd. So a project that was really going to go into patients was essentially triaged."

The Nature article said,

"The episode is only one in a series of incidents that have raised questions about the wisdom of putting the institutions that benefit from the CIRM in charge of governing it."

(Editor's note: An earlier version of this item incorrectly said the Oversight Committee has never reversed a positive recommendation for funding. In fact, committee rejected, on a 4-20 vote, a recommended training grant proposal (T3-00005) in its first round of grants Sept. 9, 2005. The grant was given a 70 score out of 100 by reviewers. However, some CIRM Oversight members said they were concerned about the lack of appropriate faculty at the unidentified institution and "under developed" lab space. The actual vote tally on the grant was not announced during the meeting nor in the minutes from the session. Our 4-20 vote count was arrived at by going through the 323-page transcript).