Some of the "normal" grants from the agency run upwards of $20 million. But in this case, it involved only $701,049. The award carried extra news heft for the San Francisco Chronicle because it went to a local institution, UC San Francisco, and was connected to the hottest medical story in the world.
Michael Matthay of UCSF was the recipient of the cash on May 15 from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). Matthay has a phase two clinical trial
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| Michael Matthay UCSF photo |
The award will largely be used to expand the clinical trial to UC Davis.
"UC Davis serves a population that includes underserved patients, and therefore adding UC Davis as a clinical site will serve the CIRM mission well. Also, please note that our UCSF Alpha Stem Cell application was focused on underserved patients in the East Bay (Sickle Cell Disease) and in San Francisco (Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital)."
Running the Davis site will be Rachael Callcut, who led the site at San Francisco General until joining Davis in March, and Tim Albertson, chair of internal medicine at UC Davis.
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| Rachael Callcut UC Davis Photo |
In Matthay's letter he defended his application (CLIN2COVID19-11823) against criticism by the anonymous reviewers who evaluated it for CIRM. The application was initially not approved by the reviewers, who gave it a score of 72 out of 100. The score was so low that it fell outside the range of normal funding. Among other things, the review summary said that reviewers disagreed about the rationale of the research and expressed concerns about whether enough Covid-19 patients could be enrolled.
Matthay said in a letter to the CIRM board that 11 Covid patients were already enrolled. As for the rationale, he said,
"There is substantial pre-clinical data that MSC therapy can decrease lung injury from bacterial and viral pneumonia and hasten lung repair. Our group and other investigators have reported several pathways by which MSCs can reduce inflammation in the lung."
After receiving the letter and hearing from Matthay via telephone at the meeting, the board overrode the reviewers' action and approved the proposal.
While Matthay's work received favorable notice in the Chronicle article (written by J.D. Morris), for CIRM it was a mixed bag. The first mention of the state funding said,
"California has invested billions of dollars in public funds to advance stem cell therapies over the last 15 years or so and, while researchers have made some important progress, a 2018 Chronicle series found that the advancements did not live up to the original promise of the 2004 ballot measure that funded the scientific endeavor."
CIRM fared somewhat better in the next mention in Morris' story:
"Matthay has no guarantee that the stem cells he’s studying will be useful in treating COVID-19. But it’s worth a shot, said Jonathan Thomas, the board chairman of the regenerative medicine institute.
"'Given that we’re dealing with something the world’s never seen before, it behooves everybody who has potential ideas to be heard,' Thomas said. 'The notion of stem cell-related treatments ... is something that at least we have to give the opportunity to have a full consideration.'"
Why does the play in the story, its use of photos (three in all) and wording matter? CIRM is all but unknown to California voters today. As the proposed, stem cell ballot initiative gains more attention, ongoing media coverage will become increasingly important. It will shape the perceptions of voters who are going to be asked in November to provide $5.5 billion more for CIRM, which is running out of money. The agency has handed out nearly all of the $3 billion that voters provided it in 2004.
The CIRM story has plenty of plenty of pluses and minuses. CIRM and its backers hope that voters will see more pluses than minuses in the media and vote to continue to finance the agency's search for stem cell treatments for everything from cancer to incontinence.
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