Stem cell agency: $16 million-plus in grants

The California stem cell agency today handed out $16.4 million in research grants seeking therapies for afflictions ranging from gum disease and cancer to vision loss and Parkinson’s Disease.

The award for Parkinson’s was relatively tiny — only $150,000 — but represented a rare case in which the agency’s governing board overturned its reviewers, who make the de facto decisions on awards.

The largest award today, $5.6 million, went to Anthony Oro of Stanford, who will be testing a therapy to treat an affliction that creates wounds that will not heal.

The reversal came after one board member, David Higgins, of San Diego, who has Parkinson’s, noted that the most common drug that Parkinson’s patients take is 70 years old. He told the board.

“I’m a fourth generation Parkinson’s patient and I’m taking the same medicine that my grandmother took. They work but not for everyone and not for long. People with Parkinson’s need new treatment options and we need them now. That’s why this project is worth supporting. It has the potential to identify some promising candidates that might one day lead to new treatments.”

The award went to Zenobia Therapeutics, Inc., of San Diego, whose president and co-founder, Vicki Nienaber, had filed an appeal on the reviewers’ decision.  Another applicant rejected by reviewers, Toshio Miki of USC, also filed an appeal with the board. His appeal was not discussed. Miki’s application sought $5.9 million for research involving metabolic disorders.

The largest award today, $5.6 million, went to Anthony Oro of Stanford, who will be testing a therapy to treat an affliction that creates wounds that will not heal. Dan Kaufman of UC San Diego received $5.5 million to produce “killer cells” to help people with a form of leukemia. Catriona Jamieson, also of UC San Diego, received $2.7 million for leukemia research.

Here is a link to summaries of reviewer remarks, including scores, on the three winners and the 11 other applications that were rejected in the translational awards category. (Scroll down on the page to see the reviews.)

In addition to the “discovery” award for Parkinson’s, here are the names of the other winners in that category:

•  DISC1-10603, Ngan F Huang, iPSC-Derived Smooth Muscle Progenitors for Treatment of Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm, Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research, $172,621
• DISC1-10475, Semil P Choksi, Generation of human airway stem cells by direct transcriptional reprogramming for disease modeling and regeneration, U.C. San Francisco, $238,408
• DISC1-10643, Dmitriy Sheyn, IVD rejuvenation using iPSC-derived notochordal cells, Cedars-Sinai, $241,992
• DISC1-10598, Alice F. Tarantal, Enhanced Branching Morphogenesis and Pluripotent Cell Lineage Differentiation for Pediatric Regenerative Therapies, U.C. Davis, $235,80
• DISC1-10583, John R Cashman, Human Pancreatic Cancer Stem Cells: Developing a Novel Drug for Cancer Eradication, Human BioMolecular Research Institute, $303,894
• DISC1-10555, Hiromitsu Nakauchi, Optimizing self-renewal signaling kinetics to stabilize ex vivo hematopoietic stem cell expansion, Stanford, $235,836
• DISC1-10620, David J. Baylin, Bone Marrow Targeting of Hematopoietic Stem Cells Engineered to Overexpress 25-OH-VD3 1-α- hydroxylase for Acute Myeloid Leukemia Therapy, Loma Linda University, $178,967
• DISC1-10513, Guillem Pratx, Novel metabolic labeling method for tracking stem cells to irradiated salivary glands using PET, Stanford, $235,613
• DISC1-10522, Gerald P Morris, Identification of antigenic neo-epitopes from in vitro reprogrammed human tissue precursors for regenerative therapy, U.C. San Diego, $193,500
• DISC1-10588, Julia J. Unternaehrer-Hamm, Targeting cancer stem cells with nanoparticle RNAi delivery to prevent recurrence and metastasis of ovarian cancer, Loma Linda University, $172,870
• DISC1-10721, Karl J. Wahli, An IPSC cell based model of macular degeneration for drug discovery, U.C. San Diego, $232,200
• DISC1-10516, Alyssa Panitch, Development of treatments to improve healing of ischemic wounds, U.C. Davis, $235,800
• DISC1-10718, Alireza Moshaverinia, Gingival mesenchymal stem cells as a novel treatment modality for periodontal tissue regeneration, U.C. Los Angeles, $194,483
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  Ed’s Note: David Jensen is a retired newsman who has followed the affairs of the $3 billion California stem cell agency since 2005 via his blog, the California Stem Cell Report, where this story first appeared.  He has published more than 4,000 items on California stem cell matters in the past 12 years.