The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine's governing board awarded a total of $37.7 million to fund 27 basic biology research projects that are intended to form a foundation for future clinical advances. (Read the CIRM release.)
CIRM's governing board also awarded $25 million to support the world's first embryonic stem cell clinical study in humans. The award to Geron Corp. will support the company's ongoing early phase trial for people with acute spinal cord injury — a therapy developed at UC Irvine.
Overall, CIRM's governing board has awarded $1.25 billion in stem cell grants, with more than half of the total going to the University of California or UC-affiliated institutions.
CIRM Basic Biology III Awards:
- UC Berkeley: $2.7 million (Song Li, Michael Rape)
- UCLA: $8 million (Gay Crooks, Shuo Lin, William Lowry, Robb MacLellan, Kathrin Plath, Yi Sun)
- UC San Diego: $10.9 million (David Cheresh, Anirvan Ghosh, Charles King, Farah Sheikh, Deborah Spector, Gene Yeo, Kun Zhang, Binhai Zheng)
- UC San Francisco: $2.5 million (Harold Bernstein, John Murnane) and $1.7 million to UCSF-affiliated J.David Gladstone Institutes (Deepak Srivastava)