Science Market Update

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) is a major funding agency for stem cell research in the Golden State. Since voters approved the establishment of the agency in 2004, the CIRM has spent billions on research and facilities with the aim of making California the stem cell capital of the US. Now, in a move to advance that research mission even further, the agency has announced awards of $32M to investigators and stem cell companies to create a biobank of diseased cell lines for the use of researchers around the world. Called the Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (hiPSC) Initiative Awards, the project will generate and ensure the availability of high quality disease-specific hiPSC resources for disease modeling, target discovery and drug discovery and development for prevalent, genetically complex diseases. 

In a recent round of new funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), two UC Irvine stem cell research labs and their collaborators at other California universities and private labs have been awarded some $37M, of which approximately $12M will go directly to UCI. The two funded projects involve translational research to develop eventual clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease, in the one study, and retinitis pigmentosa in the other. The new awards bring Irvine's total CIRM funding over the years to $96.25 million, most carried out at the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center (right) which opened its cutting-edge facility on campus 2 years ago.

The University of California Irvine may be a youngster in the world of great universities (having been established as recently as 1965), but the Southern California campus has not wasted any time distinguishing its research and academic programs. In fact, according to a recent ranking by the UK's Times Higher Education, UC Irvine is #1 in the US and #4 in the world among the Times' Top 100 Universities Under 50 Years Old. The new ranking category was added to specifically look at the merits of campuses that were not old enough to compete with prestigious, long-established institutions in areas like alumni support and "reputation" but nonetheless were strong in research and publications. The 100 Under 50 recognizes current and future promise more than past success, and in that respect UCI is unmatched in the US.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), California's stem cell agency, has just announced a new round of stem cell research funding totalling more than $69M. $12M of that will go to 5 biomedical scientists at the University of California San Diego, with an additional $4.3M awarded to a researcher at Scripps Institute, and a further $4M to two lab teams at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. That brings the total for UCSD and its affiliate La Jolla research institutes to $17.5M for this third round of CIRM's Early Translational Awards program, which supports projects that are in the initial stages of identifying drugs or cell types that could become disease therapies. UCSD alone received almost twice as much stem cell research funding in this round as any other public university, including UCSF.

The UCSD researchers and their labs that won the recent CIRM grants are:

When the University of California Berkeley (UCB) decided to actively recruit acclaimed neurologist Dr. Zhigang He away from his research position at Harvard Medical School's Children's Hospital, they knew a critical component of the package they could offer him would be a promise of substantial funding for his stem cell research on the human nervous system in his new lab.  To secure this funding, UCB applied to and received a promise of $5.6M in research funding for He from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), a statewide initiative supported by taxpayer-approved bonds.