Stem cell institute hands out 29 grants
California’s voter-created stem cell institute awarded 29 research grants worth almost $76 million to researchers at academic and nonprofit research centers Friday. The grants, the second round announced this year, bring the amount the state is spending on the nascent science to about $158 million.
UC San Francisco received the most grants -- seven -- for a total of $17.4 million. One proposal aims to find a way to make embryonic stem cells -- which have the potential to develop into any kind of cell in the body -- form a type of nerve cell that can alter the electrical activity in the brain circuits of patients with Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy. Another grant will fund research on how to make embryonic stem cells develop into brain cells that can regenerate the myelin sheath damaged by multiple sclerosis and strokes.
Stanford University received six grants totaling $15.2 million. Other grants went to the Burnham Institute for Medical Research in La Jolla; the Los Angeles-based CHA Regenerative Medicine Institute; Childrens Hospital Los Angeles; the UC San Francisco-affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes; the San Diego-based Salk Institute for Biological Studies; UC Davis; UC Irvine; UCLA; and UC San Diego. The amounts awarded to each institution ranged from $2.5 million to $7.5 million.
Dr. Gay M. Crooks, a bone marrow transplant physician at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, received $2.5 million to better understand what triggers embryonic stem cells to form blood cells. Her hope is to someday be able to produce an inexhaustible supply of cells for bone marrow transplants and blood transfusions, but she cautioned that such therapies could be years away. “We’re at the stage now in the embryonic stem cell field that the bone marrow stem cell [field] was at 20 years ago,” Crooks said. “We’re still learning how to grow the cells -- what works and what doesn’t.”
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