UC Newsroom
University of California researchers from two campuses received three grants totaling more than $12 million in funding from the state’s stem cell agency to develop stem cell treatments for Huntington’s disease, spina bifida and chronic diabetic wounds.
The funding was part of $25.2 million in Preclinical Development Awards targeting seven deadly or disabling disorders – what the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine considers “the most promising” research leading up to human clinical trials using stem cells to treat disease and injury.
UC Davis researchers were awarded a pair of grants totaling more than $7 million to develop stem cell therapies for spina bifida ($2.2 million) and chronic diabetic wounds ($5 million).
Diana Farmer, professor and chair of surgery at UC Davis Medical Center, is developing a placental stem cell therapy for spina bifida, the common and devastating birth defect that causes lifelong paralysis as well as bladder and bowel incontinence. She and her team are working on a unique treatment that can be applied in utero – before a baby is born -- in order to reverse spinal cord damage.
Roslyn Rivkah Isseroff, a UC Davis professor of dermatology, and Jan Nolta, professor of internal medicine and director of the university’s Stem Cell Program, are developing a wound dressing containing stem cells that could be applied to chronic wounds and be a catalyst for rapid healing. This is Isseroff’s second CIRM grant, and it will help move her research closer to having a product approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that specifically targets diabetic foot ulcers, a condition affecting more than 6 million people in the country.
Also, Leslie Thompson of the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center at UC Irvine has been awarded $5 million to continue her CIRM-funded effort to develop stem cell treatments for Huntington’s disease. The grant supports her next step: identifying and testing stem cell-based treatments for HD, an inherited, incurable and fatal neurodegenerative disorder. In this project, Thompson and her colleagues will create an HD therapy employing human embryonic stem cells that can be evaluated in clinical trials.
CIRM’s governing board also approved an application for the Tools and Technology Award that had been deferred from the January meeting. UCLA’s Carla Koehler will now get $1.3 million for research on a small molecule tool for reducing the malignant potential in reprogramming human induced pluripotent stem cells and embryonic stem cells.
Overall, CIRM’s governing board has awarded nearly $1.9 billion in stem cell grants, with half of the total going to the University of California or UC-affiliated institutions.