A Future for Stem Cells

As President Obama continues his welcome sprint past former President George W. Bush's policies - goodbye gag rules, torture, inattention to climate change - we'd like to pause at one destination that has a particular interest for California. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a request from Geron, a biotechnology company based in Menlo Park, to begin a human clinical trial testing embryonic stem cells.

The new decision's an excellent sign for stem cell researchers and those who have been desperately waiting for treatments. Though Obama has yet to lift all of Bush's restrictions on stem cell research, and the FDA's act doesn't mean that the federal government will be immediately investing much money in it, it does mean that the United States is finally ready to move forward. But it presents California's Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) - the San Francisco-based stem-cell institution formed to disperse $3 billion worth of bond money that California voters approved in 2004 - with a challenge. Now that the federal government is ready to take up the issue of stem cells, what will CIRM do with all that money?

One thing it won't be doing is giving that money back, despite the state's dire economic situation. Since the voters approved the money, there isn't much of a mechanism to stop CIRM from spending it.

That said, CIRM's main function may turn out to be positioning California as a job center and research hub for stem-cell research. (Economic research has shown that wherever the first seeds of a new industry germinate is where the hub of the entire industry tends to grow.) And provided that they realign their mission and funding goals, there's no reason why CIRM can't be as crucial to the future of stem-cell research as the federal government will be.

Fortunately, CIRM has already started to think about the future. "We have discussed doing things differently," said Don Gibbons, CIRM's chief communications officer. "For example, the National Institutes of Health tends to fund basic research, not transitional research, and the latter is what you need in order to get your product to market. So this month and next month we'll be talking about whether or not we should reallocate some of our funding to that research, so that we can help move stem cells to therapies and patients more quickly."

Gibbons added that the institute may also consider funding more "non cell-therapy uses of stem cells" that have shown great promise, such as drug development. "Vioxx wouldn't have gotten onto the market, for instance, if companies had been able to use stem cells to test for toxicity," he said.

We're heartened to see that CIRM is prepared to change with the times, and we encourage it to leverage the generosity of the California voter to form more partnerships with private companies and, one day soon, the federal government. California needs to stay a leader in the field of biotechnology.

source: sfgate.com