California’s Stem-Cell Quest Races Time as Money Dwindles

Californias government-run stem-cell research agency, on course to spend $3 billion in taxpayer money to find treatments for some of the worlds most intractable diseases, is pushing to accelerate human testing before its financing runs out.

For the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, time is growing short to fund research that demonstrates the potential of stem cells to help treat everything from cancer to heart disease to spinal cord injuries.

The agency, created by voters in 2004, has given out more than half of its $3 billion from state bonds and must spend the rest by 2017. The largest U.S. funding source for stem-cell research outside the federal government, its under pressure to show results to attract new money from pharmaceutical companies, venture capitalists or even more municipal bonds.

We need to figure out how to keep them going, said Jonathan Thomas, a founding partner of Saybrook Capital LLC in Los Angeles, and chairman of the institutes board, which meets today. We could do public-private partnerships, venture philanthropy, a ballot box.

Embryonic stem cells have the potential to change into any type of cell in the body. They are among the first cells created in embryos after conception. Scientists hope they may replace damaged or missing tissue in the brain, heart and immune system.

California voters approved the bonds after President George W. Bush banned the use of federal funds for research on embryonic stem cells. Since then, other types of stem cells have been shown to act like embryonic cells, relieving some of the debate over the ethics of destroying human embryos to use the cells.

The agencys funding decisions have included a grant of $20 million to a team led by Irv Weissman at the Stanford University School of Medicine, seeking a cure for cancer.

Weissmans team is working on an antibody manufactured with stem cells that allows a cancer patients own immune system to destroy a tumor, instead of relying on toxic radiation or chemotherapy. The antibody counteracts a protein called CD47, which creates what scientists call a dont eat me shield around the cancer. Once that cloak is removed, the patients immune system recognizes the cancer and attacks the tumor, shrinking or eliminating it.

Tests on humans are to begin early next year. The antibody has already worked in mice against breast, colon, ovarian, prostate, brain, bladder and liver cancer.

Two other research projects funded by the California agency are in human trials now -- one targeting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and another that regrows cardiac tissue in heart-attack victims.

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California’s Stem-Cell Quest Races Time as Money Dwindles