Stem Cell Agency Awards $39 Million

California’s stem cell research agency awarded the first of a planned $3 billion in grants Friday, announcing that a little less than $39 million would go to UCLA, UC Irvine, Stanford and several other campuses to help set up programs to train scientists.

Although the amount was relatively small, competition among 26 universities and nonprofit institutions was stiff because those selected hope to be at the front of the line for more lucrative public financing to come.

The agency’s Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee chose 16 winners.

The agency, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, was set up by Proposition 71, which voters passed last year to fund a program of research using embryonic stem cells to develop potential treatments for disease.

For now, the institute doesn’t have any of its own money to give out. Lawsuits filed by anti-tax and antiabortion groups have blocked the state from issuing the bonds that Proposition 71 authorized.

As a result, the agency’s chairman, Robert Klein, has been asking private philanthropic groups to fill the void with the expectation that they will be repaid if the agency can clear the legal hurdles it faces.

Jesse Reynolds is program director of the Center for Genetics and Society, an organization based in the Bay Area that has criticized the stem cell program in the past. He said the agency should have delayed all funding decisions until the legal issues were resolved.

“It’s irresponsible for anyone to promise something you’re not sure you can deliver,” Reynolds said.

Klein, however, said the grants were key to fulfilling “the public’s mandate to advance stem cell research both responsibly and rapidly.”

“With state leaders’ help,” he said, “we should be able to fund the grants by next month.”

Klein said he expected that the groups that have sued would lose in court, allowing the bond sale to go forward, because to win they would have to demonstrate something he called implausible: that stem cell training would cause “irreparable harm” to the state.

“But in any case,” he said, “we had to announce the grants today, to make it clear that California is poised and ready to recruit the nation’s best and brightest stem cell researchers.”

The grant requests were initially judged by a group of out-of-state scientists and researchers, which made recommendations to the oversight committee.

Many members of the oversight committee had affiliations with the groups they were evaluating and had to remove themselves from judging in those cases.

Peter Bryant, the co-director of UC Irvine’s Stem Cell Research Center, said he thought the committee may have chosen his program, despite criticism from the out-of-state advisory board that it lacked “a strong track record in stem cell research,” precisely because “we have a lot of junior faculty poised to make a bigger impact on research than those in bigger, more established institutions.”

Dr. Judith Gasson, the co-director of UCLA’s stem cell research institute and director of the university’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, speculated that the agency chose UCLA because of “our special strengths in monitoring and treating stem cells. We are the only publicly funded university in California to have FDA-approved facilities for stem cell transplantations.”

Gasson acknowledged that the $3.75 million her students will receive over three years won’t buy much in the research world.

But she said she believed that the award would position UCLA for money to fund more ambitious research in the future.

Zach Hall, the agency’s interim president, didn’t quarrel with that interpretation.

“When we were considering the applications,” he said, “we were well aware that research training and research performance are closely linked.”

The other winning institutions were UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and UC Davis, as well as the La Jolla-based Burnham Institute for cancer research; Caltech; Childrens Hospital Los Angeles; the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla; the J. Gladstone Institutes, affiliated with UC San Francisco; the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla; and USC.