Autism to Bladder Cancer: California Awards $25.2 Million For Stem Cell Research

The California stem cell agency yesterday approved $25.2 million for research involving a spate of diseases, ranging from HIV and autism to hearing loss and bladder cancer.

The only application involving clinical stage work was submitted by Xiuli Wang of the City of Hope in Duarte, Ca., for her research on a CAR-T treatment to achieve a functional cure for HIV infection without the need for antiretroviral drug therapy.

The application (CLIN1-11223) sought $3.8 million to take her proposed therapy to the point where it can win approval to begin clinical trials. Here is a link to the summary of the review of her application. 

Directors of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine(CIRM), as the agency is formally known, also approved $13.5 million in awards to translate basic research into clinical work and $7.9 million for more basic research. 

Here is a list of the principal investigators in the translation round. Summaries of the reviews can be found in this document. Translation refers to research that is moving from the basic stage to clinical.

• Steven Schwartz of UCLA, $5.1 million, TRAN1-11265, clinical translation of autologous regenerative cell therapy for blindness
• Karin Gaensler of UCSF, $4.2 million, TRAN1-11259, development of engineered autologous leukemia vaccines to target residual leukemic stem cells
• Ted Leng of Stanford, also $4.2 million, TRAN1-11300, a purified allogeneic cell therapy product for treatment of dry age-related macular degeneration

Here is a list of awards whose approval was stalled in July for financial reasons. The review summaries with scores can be found in this document.

• Tracy Grikscheit of Children's Hospital Los Angeles, $1.3 million, DISC2-10979, Universal Pluripotent Liver Failure Therapy (UPLiFT)
• Philip Beachy of Stanford, $1.4 million, DISC2-11105, pluripotent stem cell-derived bladder epithelialprogenitors for definitive cell replacement therapy of bladder cancer
• Jonathan Lin of UC San Diego, DISC2-10973, $1.2 million, small molecule proteostasis regulators to treat photoreceptor diseases
• Stuart Lipton of Scripps, DISC2-11070, $1.8 million, drug development for autism spectrum disorder
• Neil Segil of USC, DISC2-11183, $833,971, A screen for drugs to protect against chemotherapy-induced hearing loss, using sensory hair cells derived by direct lineage reprogramming from hiPSCs
• Alan Cheng of Stanford, DISC2-11199, $1.4 million, modulation of the Wnt pathway to restore inner ear function