Duane Roth, CEO of San Diego’s Connect (and an Xconomist), was elected today as vice-chair of the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s stem cell agency. He was nominated by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who cited Roth’s 30-year experience in San Diego’s biotech industry and at Connect, which promotes innovative technologies by helping San Diego entrepreneurs. The governing board voted to approve the creation of two vice chairs, and elected former state Sen. Art Torres, a cancer survivor and patient advocate, to serve as the other vice chair.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Venture funding for San Diego’s life science companies seems to have slowed to a trickle, but four local biotechs are among the first companies to get grants from California’s taxpayer-funded stem cell institute.

The 29-member governing board for the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine voted Wednesday to approve funding of more than $19.8 million for 23 grant proposals. The grants ranged from $700,000 to $1.1 million, with 17 going to fund research at academic, non-profit laboratories and six designated for California biotech companies.

The institute was established in early 2005 following the passage of a state ballot measure to provide $3 billion to fund stem cell research. California voters passed proposition 71 in 2004, after the Bush Administration dramatically curbed federal funding for stem cell research.

Since then, the institute has distributed more than $614 million in 229 grants. But until now only one of those grants went to a biotech company—a $50,000 grant for San Diego-based Novocell.

As institute president Alan Trounson said in a prepared statement Wednesday, “These awards represent the entry of the biotechnology industry into CIRM-funded initiatives to accelerate progress.”

The grants approved and the San Diego biotechs receiving them were:

—$827,072 for Novocell to advance development of “an implantable device” to capture and retain pancreatic stem cells. Novocell researchers have already implanted the device, a semi-permeable pouch, into animals and collected pancreas stem cells, which develop into mature cells that produce insulin.

—$749,520 for a joint effort by Fluidigm of South San Francisco and StemGent, a Cambridge, MA, biotech with operations in San Diego, to develop a screening technology to help stem cell researchers “reverse engineer” skin cells into stem cells. The technique would enable researchers to work with stem cells in a way that avoids ethical objections and technical barriers to using embryonic stem cells.

—$869,262 for an application by Invitrogen, now known as Life Technologies, for developing methods of modelling human neurodegenerative diseases in human embryonic stem cells. Researchers plan to focus their work on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

—$906,629 for Vala Sciences to develop new and improved techniques for developing mature heart cells called cardiomyocyte cells from human embryonic stem cells.

In a related move, the institute’s 29-member governing body agreed to accelerate funding for commercial entities to provide “greater financial stability” for California’s biotechnology sector, which “faces significant challenges arising from the credit crisis and economic downturn.”

The accelerated funding program enables biotechs with applications that are recommended by the institute’s scientific working group to immediately get the first payment of their grant or loan upon approval by the institute’s governing board.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

It has been seven years since the Bush Administration restricted federal funding on human embryonic stem cells, and four years since California voters responded by passing Proposition 71. The initiative jump-started stem cell research here by providing $3 billion in state funding for “regenerative medicine” over the next decade.

Since then, the term “stem cells” has become a rallying cry in San Diego for a new wave of industrial development in the life sciences.

So as several hundred biomedical researchers and others gathered Friday for San Diego’s third annual “Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa,” a sense of expectation, anticipation, and even germination filled the air. “We’re talking about the dawn of a new era in how we replace hearts and kidneys, muscle and liver,” says Babak Esmaeli-Azad, president of privately held DNAmicroarray in San Diego.

While it is not yet clear exactly how stem cell research can be commercialized, Esmaeli-Azad and others already have moved to provide research tools—the so-called shovels and blue jeans—to the scientists panning for gold.

DNAmicroarray provides proprietary systems for controlling the differentiation of human stem cells. But Esmaeli-Azad says he also has personally invested $2 million on internal stem cell research for potential therapies.

“We did not do any stem cell business three years ago,” Esmaeli-Azad says. But now, with a new U.S. president preparing to take office and state funding flowing from Prop 71 through the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Esmaeli-Azad says he expects some big changes in the field. “So I am here as a very interested and excited stem cell researcher, but also as a very cautious businessman,” Esmaeli-Azad said.

The one-day forum at the Salk Institute was coordinated by the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, an umbrella organization that includes stem cell researchers from Salk, the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, The Scripps Research Institute and UC San Diego. The consortium happily renamed itself in September, after announcing a $30 million donation from South Dakota philanthropist T. Denny Sanford. Sanford’s funding has been combined with a $43 million grant in Prop 71 funding to build a four-story facility on North Torrey Pines Mesa for research in regenerative medicine. The new research center is expected to open by 2010, with groundbreaking set to begin this January.

Funding from Prop 71 also is expected to be available to biotech startups in the form of loans early next year to support the commercialization of stem cell research, said Floyd Bloom, a neuroscientist and professor emeritus at The Scripps Research Institute. “Venture capital at the moment doesn’t happen to believe that stem cells are going to be a viable business, so we think the loan program will really help move the commercialization process along,” said Bloom, who sits on a citizens committee overseeing the allocation of Prop 71 funds.

Sponsors of the conference range from established behemoths such as Invitrogen, the Carlsbad maker of laboratory research tools, to San Diego startup Histogen and Boston, MA-based Stemgent, which have also targeted stem cell researchers.

Histogen, founded last year, provides a human extra-cellular matrix that can be used to grow stem cell lines. Stemgent, founded earlier this year, has almost 40 employees in Boston and San Diego developing specialized antibody panels, cytokine kits, and other research tools.

Duane Roth, the chief executive of Connect (and a San Diego Xconomist), says this year’s Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa was organized to focus on research in four specific areas: heart disease, neurodegenerative disease, diabetes, and cancer.

A keynote presentation by Harvard’s Kenneth Chien, for example, outlined recent progress in identifying the primogenitor heart cells and the myriad ways in which they differentiate into different types of heart cells. He also showed how it may someday be possible to use stem cells to grow new heart tissue on a thin film membrane that could be used as a graft to repair damaged heart tissue.

Like many others, Roth is encouraged by San Diego’s progress so far. As he put it, “We’re a lot farther along than we thought we’d be.”

Comments | Reprints | Share: