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. 

Since its first lemonade stand was set up in 2000 by a little girl with cancer, the Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) has raised over $60M to support pediatric cancer research at institutions across the United States. That's a lot of lemonade. While lemonade stands are still a staple of the organization's activities, celebrity support and large fund raising events like the recent "Lemon Ball" (which raised a record $825K) allow ALSF to leverage the kind of funds that really make a difference. In a recent round of funding awards, the University of California San Francisco's Benioff Children's Hospital was named a Center of Excellence by the foundation and given $1.75M to speed translational research programs and training over the next five years. Chief investigator on the grant is Dr. Katherine Matthay, chief of pediatric oncology at Benioff. She says of the ALSF award in a recent news release:

UCSF, Mission Bay biomedical research programs are developing and expanding at a rapid rate. Currently, the university has more ongoing biomedical construction projects than anywhere else in the world. Many new research centers and institutes are appearing in spaces that also contain areas for clinical trials and patient care.

Funding makes laboratory research possible, which makes discovery possible, which leads to advancing knowledge and treatment options. But the primary job of a top scientist and lab director should not be to write grant proposals at the expense of time spent actually doing research. With that insight in mind, the University of California San Francisco put a system in place 5 years ago called the Resource Allocation Program (RAP). The function of the RAP is to streamline the intramural funding process so that faculty only have to fill out one application for many grants, and then only twice a year on set dates. A recent review of the program shows it to be a success, with a 66% increase in overall applications submitted and approximately a 20% increase in funding awarded in the past year alone.

The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the largest, most successful established biotech hubs in the US, thanks in part to the presence of 3 of the world's top universities: UCSF, UC Berkeley, and Stanford.  Strong on intellectual capital, the area has been notoriously short of real estate since developers were ordered to stop filling in the Bay back in the 60's.  Fortunately, as manufacturing waned, industrial land became available for redevelopment as high-tech R&D lab space, which is how UCSF's Mission Bay campus eventually came to be.  Across the Bay to the East, bayfront industrial property is seeing a similar repurposing, with particularly mushroom-like life science growth in the little city of Emeryville, though also in neighboring Berkeley and Richmond.

The San Francisco Biotechnology Vendor Showase™ Event (BVS) at UCSF last Thursday saw sunshine,  a wide variety of research products, and a range of exhibiting companies from Airgas Norpac to EMD Millipore Bioscience Division. And then there were the Science Ninjas....

Dr. Cynthia Kenyon and her colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, started on an ambitious project two decades ago (much challenged at first): to combat age-related diseases by figuring out what the genetic basis is for aging itself.  That research has produced results that have quite literally changed the terms of the debate, overturning the previous assumption that aging was haphazard and unrelated to genetic behavior.  Thanks to Dr. Kenyon's determination to pursue her research, we now have several enticing keys to the way that bodies get old, or not, and we know that genes do in fact regulate the process of deterioration that tends to accompany aging.  "Aging youthfully" might best describe the longterm aim of Kenyon's work, or "negligible senescence," meaning that age does not lead inevitably to decreased vigor and increased susceptibility to disease.

University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a standout leader among the world’s health science centers.  For over thirty years the institution has taken a holistic approach, combining patient care, health education, and research.  Here are four highlights that help distinguish UCSF’s as an outstanding leader for biomedical research. 

UCSF, Mission Bay currently has over $1 Billion in construction projects underway, making it the largest ongoing biomedical building in the world and is one of the top NIH funded universities in the nation.  Currently the school receives more federal funding than any other public university and is third overall among public and private institutions.