Stem Cell Directors Moving on $243 Million Program and Industry-Friendly Efforts

Directors of the California stem cell agency will meet next week to begin the first stage of giving away $243 million in their pursuit to push a stem cell therapy into the clinic.

The immediate effort involves $3.3 million in planning grants for the second round of the CIRM disease team program. Applications are targeting cancer, HIV, Alzheimer's, ALS, Huntington's Disease, Parkinson's and muscular dystrophy, among others. The next step in the disease team effort will be much larger – $240 million, to be awarded next summer with roughly $20 million for each grant.

For the smaller planning grants to be awarded next week, 36 researchers applied for cash of up to $100,000. Nineteen were approved for funding by the grants review group, which is tantamount to full CIRM board approval. Their scores ranged from 87 to 62. One application was approved for funding but no score was listed. However, that application was ranked below the application with a score of 62. CIRM provided no explanation for failing to publish the score. Names of applicants were not disclosed in keeping with the agency's longstanding practice.

The disease team round was open to both business and academic researchers. We have queried CIRM about whether any businesses applied. The stem cell industry has been less than happy with its meager share of CIRM grants. The $3 billion agency's new chair, Jonathan Thomas, has indicated he wants to make CIRM more industry friendly.

The board meeting next week will be Thomas' first full session as chairman. The meeting was originally scheduled for two days, which was not uncommon under the tenure of former Chairman Robert Klein. But next week's session has been reduced to one day under Thomas. The agenda also seems not as fully packed as under Klein, although it has two executive sessions that could consume a fair amount of time. One deals with the evaluation of CIRM President Alan Trounson. The other deals with proprietary matters on grant applications.

Heavy agendas during the Klein era often generated quorum problems because of the supermajority requirements for voting by the board. It took so long to work through the material that competing priorities among board members meant that some – sometimes quite a few – had to leave.

Today – with eight business days before the Aug. 25 meeting – the agenda has a fair amount of background material posted, giving interested parties a chance to examine the information in a timely fashion.

Included on the agenda is a document about CIRM's ongoing issues, including security, with its self-developed, computerized grants management program, a listing of its translational grant portfolio and a plan to extend its $44 million researcher recruitment effort.

The CIRM board also has plans to take up a report from its new Intellectual Property Subcommittee.  The full board agenda contained no indication of what the report would deal with, but presumably it will involve a new, $30 million program aimed at the stem cell industry. That program will be acted on by the IP subcommittee next Monday, preceding the full board meeting. The panel's recommendation would normally go to the full board meeting on Aug. 25.

Also missing from the agenda is any explanation of the purpose of the discussion of the translational grant portfolio or analysis of the portfolio. Additionally, still to come is the latest version of changes in the grant review process for CIRM's big-ticket grant efforts as well as a job description for CIRM's first-ever chief financial officer.

The job description effort has been underway for some months and is linked closely to issues involving CIRM's controversial dual executive arrangement between the chairman and president. The new CFO will be reporting to both the president and the chairman.

The disease team planning grant item also reflected a change in the way CIRM presents the public summary of reviewer comments on the applications. The new format is more concise. Gone is the narrative format that often contained a more fulsome discussion of the applications. Here is a link to one summary on a planning grant application and another link to an application in January.

CIRM's Trounson and Australian Visiting Professorship

An Australian nanomedicine center announced this spring that CIRM President Alan Trounson would be spending all of July 2012 as a visiting professor; however, that arrangement appears to be less than certain.

We queried CIRM about the announcement, asking how much Trounson, who earns $490,000 as president of the stem cell agency, would be paid as a visiting professor in Australia, the source of the compensation and whether the compensation was vetted for possible conflicts of interest.

About a week ago, Don Gibbons, the agency's chief communications officer, replied,

"Whether this happens is still under discussion, but if it does it is most likely one or two weeks, and would focus on nanotechnology and how it might impact the stem cell field, and what we should be doing about it in California."

The announcement from the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine came as a surprise to some members of the CIRM board late in June. The center is part of the University of New South Wales and was formed in April 2010. Trounson, who emigrated from Australia to take the CIRM post, would be the second visiting professor in the program. 

CIRM's Trounson Has Month-Long Gig in Australia in July 2012

The Australian Centre for NanoMedicine has announced that the president of the $3 billion California stem cell agency, Alan Trounson, will be spending July 2012 as its "visiting professor."

The announcement apparently came as a surprise to some directors of the state's research program, which paid Trounson $490,118 in 2010. There was no date on the announcement but it appears to have been placed on the Internet sometime this spring.

The center is part of the University of New South Wales and was formed in April 2010. Trounson, who emigrated from Australia to take the CIRM post, is the second visiting professor in the program.

The center's announcement did not specify whether Trounson would be paid for his stint in Australia next year. Nor did it explain his exact duties. The center has at least one very slight connection to CIRM. Geoff Symonds, a longtime Australian researcher and chief scientific officer of Calimmune of Tucson, Az., made a presentation at the center's international conference last June 30-July 2. Calimmune, whose founders include former CIRM director, Nobel Laureate David Baltimore, shares in a $20 million grant with Irvin Chen of UCLA.

For more on Calimmune, see here and here.

We are querying CIRM for more information on Trounson's commitments in July 2012.

Trounson Joins the Blogging World

The president of the $3 billion California stem cell agency, Alan Trounson, has taken up blogging.

While he is no Matt Drudge(the high impact political blogger in Washington, D.C.), Trounson's effort is worth regular scrutiny especially by scientists seeking CIRM cash.

Blogger Trounson

Trounson blogged on April 22 about his views on current stem cell research around the world. His item was an extension of the summaries that he presents to CIRM directors at their regular meetings.

Trounson wrote,

"Since I arrived at CIRM late in 2007 I have maintained a tradition of presenting some of the top science journal papers from the previous month or two at each of our board meetings. Beginning last month, I decided this would be easier to digest in a written document than in PowerPoint slides amid a harried board meeting. You can see an archive of these periodic stem cell reports on our website.

"This month I want to start a second part of the new tradition, a brief blog note to let you know why I, as someone who toiled in stem cell labs for many years, chose these items as some of the most important papers in the field in the past month or so."

Trounson went on to comment, via a separate link, on research by M. Eiraku, Sheng Ding, Elias Zambidis, Howard Chang, R. Perlingeiro, P. Ma, Shinya Yamanaka, E. Morrisey and Richard Lee.

Trounson's new endeavor is a worthwhile contribution. It provides insight for other scientists and interested parties into the thinking at the highest level of a major funding organization.

As for Trounson's comments about PowerPoint, he is spot on. PowerPoint burdens every meeting of the CIRM board of directors and is a lazy and poor way of presenting complex information. Some critics refer to PowerPoint-induced sleep and death by PowerPoint. Says one critic,

"PowerPoint makes us stupid."

The PowerPoint problem, pervasive in many organizations, may have been best captured in an article last year about its impact on the American military. The headline on the New York Times story said,

"We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint."

Consider this follow-up comment on military.com:

"The amount of information that gets conveyed in 20 Powerpoint slides is probably less than a five page paper. It takes forever to brief it, which limits the time for serious discussion by the audience or the senior officials who are subjected to the presentation.

"With Powerpoint, the military has been moving toward an oral tradition and away from the written word, with all the demands for precision, nuance and serious exposition that writing requires. And it's not just a problem for the military. The procedure has become quite common in other areas of government, among contractors and in think tanks.

"Sometimes Powerpoint presentations are used as a kind of bureaucratic filibuster: they can be a way to eat up time and restrict the opportunity for hard questions. But even when that is not the intent they are generally not the best means of communication. Clear and concise writing requires that issues be thought through and that is not always necessary if all that is required is to slap a few bullets on a slide.

"It would be far more efficient to prepare a concise and analytical paper that provides the essential information and arguments, circulate it in advance and then take questions about the assessment and recommendations at a meeting. If maps, graphics and charts are important they can be attached to the paper as needed. The essential information could be absorbed before the meeting, which could then be devoted to serious debate and discussion."

Enough said. I will now dismount from my PowerPoint soapbox.

Trounson's Views on Grant Terminations at CIRM

The California stem cell agency and the NIH have some things in common. They both give away billions of dollars, and they both generally work outside the view of the general public.

But major differences do exist. CIRM operates on borrowed money. The NIH does not – at least nominally. CIRM operates free of legislative or meddling by the state's top official(the governor). The NIH does not. Congress and the president have full sway over the organization. Another difference involves oversight that the agencies exercise on the scientists who are beneficiaries of their largess. The NIH basically sends the money out the door and researchers do whatever they want – at least that is the view of some. CIRM, however, has actually terminated at least three grants (out of 406) from scientists who are not meeting the requirements of the grants. However, the agency has not reported since June 2009 whether additional grants have been withdrawn.

CIRM President Alan Trounson earlier this year described CIRM's efforts to ensure that researchers are abiding by the terms of their grants. He spoke at a meeting in January of the Citizens Financial Accountability Oversight Committee. The panel, chaired by the state's top fiscal officer, Controller John Chiang, is a sister organization to CIRM and is the only state entity specifically charged with overseeing CIRM finances.

Trounson made his remarks in connection with his summary of last fall's blue-ribbon external review report and its concern about lean staffing at CIRM.

Here is what Trounson had to say, according to the transcript of his remarks.

"We were going to...increase the number of scientific staff because we actually feed back on our projects. The NIH does not feed back on the projects, nor do many of the research foundations. So when we get quarterly reports or yearly reports, we're feeding back to those scientists, saying, hey, that's not what you really agreed to, or fantastic, you've accelerated....We have a one-to-one on the scientists. And if it's a company, we are making sure that they are meeting those kind of deadlines that they put in.

"That does not happen with NIH nor with many of the other funding bodies. We want it to happen. We're here for a relatively short time. Maybe they're there forever, but we want these dollars to work as effectively as possible. So we have stopped some projects. We've actually terminated them because they didn't do what they agreed to do. It's never happened with an NIH project. And you can imagine some of the senior scientists in California being told you didn't do what you said you were going to do, and we're going to take your grant away because we've given you a couple of opportunities to correct that, but you didn't. And that has happened. So we are different in that respect."

CIRM's oversight on grants is increasingly important as it ventures into clinical trials and more translational research. Terms of those grants and loans require deadlines for specific achievements and go or no-go decisions that are more commonly made by businesses than governmental agencies. With tens of millions of dollars at stake on an individual grant, the process is likely to trigger ferocious behind-the-scenes debate.

Here is more on grant terminations at CIRM.

Aussie Stem Cell Scientists Looking for Help From California

Life is not so good for Australian stem cell researchers, and they are hoping that the $3 billion California stem cell agency can make things better.

At least so says a news report from Down Under. According to The Australian newspaper, proposed government funding for stem cell research will be slashed by 50 percent next year.

However, the article said,

“The scientists are hoping negotiations for a potential joint funding deal between the National Health and Medical Research Council and the $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine will deliver extra cash.

“The California institute, run by Australian stem cell pioneer Alan Trounson, has a joint deal with the Victorian government.

“Speaking from San Francisco, Professor Trounson told The Australian he was hopeful an agreement could be reached.

"'We can fund research together or we can do it independently, but if you do it independently you have to resource these teams adequately,' he said.”

Trounson was director of the Monash Immunology and Stem Cell Laboratories at Monash University prior to joining CIRM in 2008.

It is not clear how California could legally provide meaningfiul financial assistance to Australian stem cell researchers. CIRM is barred from spending research funds out-of-state, which Trounson apparently refers to in his comment about “independently” funding research.

We are querying CIRM regarding The Australian article, including whether the writer, Andrew Trounson, is related to Alan Trounson.

A Theatrical Trounson Appearance in San Francisco

"A sharp and generous comedy, for our times, on roller skates," it's been called. So what does it have to do with the $3 billion California stem cell agency.

The answer: The author of the play is Kylie Trounson(see photo), daughter of Alan Trounson, who presides over the Golden State's research effort.

The play, "The Man with the September Face," will premiere in the United States at the Boxcar Playhouse in San Francisco for one night Friday at 7 p.m. A reception will follow the staged reading.

One Australian writer said this about the play,

"The decadent but vacuous nature of the Eighties aesthetic is a rich platform for investigating our existential artist, Jesse, languishing in a suburban intellectual and political wasteland. In synch with the Berlin Wall, he finally crumbles. "

Kylie Trounson is a playwright, actor and teaches drama and acting.

If I were a CIRM staffer, I would be sure to attend this event. It would be the politic thing to do.

Hitching Up Down Under

Alan Trounson, the incoming president of the California stem cell agency, says it will be a "very low key affair" with a few friends and a small reception.

You might call it a stem cell wedding. But not exactly one contemplated six months ago.

Trounson (see photo) and his partner for the last 19 years, Karin, will be getting married. As we all know, Trounson has taken a job in the United States. But Karin – not to mention their children -- will not be able to come along with him unless they perform the nuptials. So say US immigration authorities, despite Karin's Swedish and Australian citizenship and dual passports.

The couple have two boys: Karl, 16, and Alex, 6. Trounson has two other children, Kylie, a 30-year-old lawyer, playwright and actress, and Justin, 27, who has international interests in the tourist industry.

Trounson said Karin has a Ph.D. in women's health and would like to continue her career in California.

He told the California Stem Cell Report:

"We are very comfortable and supportive partners and have no problem in getting married."

He added,

"Karin thinks the event is worth celebrating but our commitment to each other is larger than this ceremony. The kids are joining in on the fun."

We figure the wedding feast will include roasted koala and aquavit. And the music? Well, probably didgeridoos and accordions.

Our congratulations to them both. Actually, congratulations to all four or is it six?

No Aussie Location for July 12 Presidential Meeting

The folks down under are not going to have a chance to comment on the selection process for the next president of the $3 billion California stem cell agency.

Australia will be dropped from the list of remote locations for the teleconference meeting of the Oversight Committee on July 12. The site in Australia was listed on the agenda because California stem cell chairman Robert Klein was visiting the country. However, he will return on July 8. We are told that listing the Australian location was an error.