Twelve University of California scientists received $36.7 million in grants Thursday (May 24) from the state's stem cell agency to support projects that are in the initial stages of identifying drugs or cell types that could become disease therapies.

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine awarded a total of $69 million to help develop therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer's, heart disease and multiple sclerosis. The grants for the third round of CIRM's Early Translational Awards program included its first-ever collaboratively funded research projects with China and the federal government of Australia and a new project with Germany.

Overall, CIRM's governing board has awarded $1.3 billion in stem cell grants, with more than half of the total going to the University of California or UC-affiliated institutions.

CIRM Early Translational III Awards:
UC Davis: $6.7 million (Kyriacos Athanasiou, Walter Boyd)
UC Irvine: $4.8 million (Thomas Lane)
UC San Diego: $11.8 million (Eric David Adler, Lawrence Goldstein, Mark Tuszynski, Yang Xu, Eugene Wei-Ming Yeo)
UC San Francisco: $7.1 million (Morton Cowan, Arnold Kriegstein and Holger Willenbring and $6.3 million to UCSF-affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes (Deepak Srivastava)

For more information:
CIRM release