Directors of the California stem cell agency this week are
expected to approve nearly $98 million in awards for early stage
clinical trials for treatments of diseases ranging from sickle cell
anemia to cancer.
The awards will involve the $3 billion agency's signature disease
team program, which is aimed at pushing stem cell research into the
marketplace.
In addition to sickle cell anemia and cancer(see here, here and here), the applications
involve therapies for macular degeneration, arthritis and severe airway obstruction. Names of the applicants were withheld by the
agency. The identities of successful applicants will be released
following board action. Names of the rejected applicants, however, are not
released by the agency. The number of business applications was also
not immediately released.
The goal of the latest round in the disease team program is completion of an early phase clinical trial during the
award period, which can be up to four years. Amounts of the proposed
awards range from $20 million to $4.4 million. CIRM originally budgeted $100 million for this round.
Four applications won outright approval from the agency's grant
reviewers. CIRM staff recommended that three out of four “tier two”
grants be approved. The scientific scores of all seven of those
applications range from 79 to 67 on a scale of 100.
Some of the five rejected applicants and sympathetic patient
advocates may well appear at the board meeting in Los Angeles on Wednesday and Thursday to lobby for their proposals. The CIRM board can fund
any of the applications, regardless of their scientific scores.
Here are links to the ample information provided by CIRM staff on
the grant applications: summaries of the grant reviews, staff justification for funding tier two applications, Power Point presentations to be made to directors on the applications, including
the range of scores on individual applications. However, the range
of scores on the rejected applications was not provided.
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