The California Stem Cell Agency and an HIV Cure: Pushing for a Clinical Trial in 2014

Posted: June 24, 2012 at 3:56 pm


The California stem cell agency's
leading efforts to find a cure for HIV – one tied to the famous "Berlin Patient" – received a plug today in a piece in the
state capital's largest circulation newspaper, The Sacramento Bee.

The article by David Lesher focused on
a $14 million CIRM grant to the City of Hope in Los Angeles that also
involves Sangamo BioSciences of Richmond, Ca. The team hopes to
launch a clinical trial by the end of next year.
The Berlin Patient is Timothy Brown,
now of San Francisco, who is the only person in the world known to
have been cured of HIV/AIDs. It came about as a side effect of a
blood transfusion carrying a rare mutation of a gene found almost
entirely among northern Europeans. Lesher, director of governmental
affairs for the Public Policy Institute in Sacramento, wrote,

"The
possibility of curing a global pandemic like AIDS with funding from
the California bond is exactly the kind of exciting potential that
inspired voters to approve Proposition 71 by
a wide margin. But the HIV research is also a good example of the
challenge facing the state's stem cell agency
as it tries to show voters that they made a good investment. 

“None
of the research under way will reach patients until long after the 10
years of funding by the ballot measure runs out. With the HIV
project, researchers hope to be in human trials by 2014, but it is
likely to be at least 10 years before they can show it might work in
humans. And in the case of a stem cell cure
for AIDS, it would be many years after that before a treatment is
widely available.”

Jeff
Sheehy, a prominent AIDS activist and a board member at the stem
cell agency,
described the effort as "the global home run. That's not in 10
years. … But this could be the beginning of something really
amazing."
Lesher also wrote,

"Nobody
thought stem cells might
be used to cure HIV when the bond (funding for the stem cell agency)
passed. Far from the embryonic stem cell treatments
that inspired the ballot measure, the HIV research involves a new and
growing integration of stem cell and
genetic science."

Indeed,
the ballot initiative that created the $3 billion California stem
cell agency trumpeted its devotion to human embryonic stem cell
research, which had been throttled by the Bush Administration. The
agency has veered away from hESC research, which now amounts
to less than $450 million out of the $1.4 billion in grants approved
since 2004. 

Source:
http://californiastemcellreport.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

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