New Tool for Wading Through California's $2.5 Billion in Stem Cell Spending

The $3 billion California stem cell agency this week added a valuable feature that is aimed at giving better access to information concerning its active research portfolio, which currently runs to more than 160 projects.

The feature is called the Active Awards Portfolio Dashboard. Its development was overseen by Karen Ring, the agency's social media honcho. Writing on the agency's blog, she said,

"This interactive tool makes it easy to search through the active research projects that we’re currently funding, and filter these projects by disease focus, technology type or stage of research."

The new dashboard is a companion to the clinical awards dashboard, also engineered by Ring. The agency's website contains vast quantities of information. The dashboards provide tools that help readers wade through it and ferret out what is most relevant to their individual needs.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine(CIRM), as the agency is formally known, has funded 969 projects costing nearly $2.5 billion during its 13-year history . It is slated to run out of cash in 2019 unless ambitious fundraising plans fulfill their promise. 

Internet Outage for California Stem Cell Agency Earlier This Week: Cause Unknown

California's $3 billion stem cell agency went dark on the Internet earlier this week, the second time it has had a significant Internet outage in recent months.

The outage began on Monday afternoon. The agency was back up by Tuesday at about 7 p.m. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), as the agency is formally known,. reported that the problem did not affect internal work but did affect public access to agency information. It also blocked any incoming email or outgoing email. However, all of the email went through after the problem was solved. 

In response to a question from the California Stem Cell Report, Kevin McCormack, senior director for communications, said,

"At about 1 p.m. on Monday 10/9/2017 our external Domain Name System (DNS) provider dropped our DNS records, that meant people looking for our website, blog, GMS(grant management system), and email servers were unable to access them as DNS converts names (like www.cirm.ca.gov) into an IP (internet protocol) address (like 192.168.2.3) so that the appropriate server may be accessed by your browser. 

"We are working with our DNS provider to find out the root cause of that event.  In the meantime, we brought up a new external DNS server with another provider to restore name resolution.

"The servers for www.cirm.ca.gov and grants.cirm.ca.gov were themselves unaffected in that they continued to operate as normal awaiting requests - but without external DNS converting names into IP addresses, no requests would come to those servers from outside of CIRM.

 "CIRM staff and the GWG (grant application reviewers) then meeting at CIRM were still able to continue as usual accessing the GMS since they were using internal DNS servers.  Similarly, all purely internal email within CIRM was unaffected - however, because we were without external DNS, any email coming into or out of CIRM was not delivered."

Editor's note: An earlier version of this incorrectly stated that the problem was the first significant outage for the agency.