Tuesday, December 08, 2015

Attacking Barriers to Stem Cell Cures: California to Put Official Stamp on New Strategy

Call it California’s $900-million road map to a stem cell cure. 

That’s what up for final action next week by the governing board of the state’s $3 billion stem cell agency, officially known as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).

The plan includes a $105 million lure to entice Big Pharma and other possible investors to join the Golden State’s regenerative medicine bandwagon and create an “industrial stem cell therapeutic powerhouse.” 

Randy Mills, president of the California stem cell agency, and his team are calling for “attacks” on barriers to clinical development of therapies. That includes the FDA which Mills and company say “appears to be literally lobbying against the very therapeutic modality they are responsible for promoting.” (See here and here.)

The key part of the $105 million stem surge would bring together next year the state of California and private investors in a joint enterprise. Under the plan, the private investors would have the pick of the best research from CIRM that has not already attracted partners.

The agency would pony up $75 million with another $75 million coming from investors.
(Here are links to the CIRM description of the three components of the $105 million effort: here, here and here.)

The agenda for the Dec. 17 meeting in Los Angeles includes other matters, such as action on a clinical research applications for millions of dollars. The review summaries of those applications are not yet available online, but most of the additional supporting material for the meeting has been posted. That is a healthy change from some recent past meetings where backup information has been missing until much too late.

(The morning of Wednesday Dec. 9, the agency posted a note on the agenda saying the applications were no longer under consideration. Often that means that the proposals have been withdrawn because of negative recommendations from reviewers.)

Also on tap is a major change in the scoring of applications in non-clinical programs. Here is how the change is described by a CIRM memo:

“For non-Clinical Program applications, therefore, we propose to revert to our former scoring system (1 to 100) with two tiers: (Tier 1) average score of 85 or above, recommended for funding, if funds are available, and (Tier 2) average score of 84 or below, not recommended for funding. In  addition, for those programs for which only one application is expected to be funded, we propose to specify that the application that receives the highest average scientific score shall be deemed to be the GWG’s recommendation for funding.”

These changes would be in effect for the three rounds involved in the $105 million surge.

The board is also being asked to raise the cap on payments to patient advocate members of the board from $15,000 to $30,000 annually. The move would be retroactive to the beginning of this year. 

A CIRM memo said that demands on patient advocate directors have increased dramatically both in terms of the numbers of meetings and their role. The memo said that prior to Mills’ arrival at CIRM patient advocates were involved in only three or four review sessions a year. In 2015, those sessions have already risen to close to a dozen.

While next week’s meeting will be based in Los Angeles, remote, telephonic locations where the public can participate will be located at Stanford and UC San Diego. Specific addresses can be found on the agenda.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Search This Blog