Discoverer of brain stem cells becomes president of ISSCR

The North County Times had a good story yesterday about Fred Gage's new role as the president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. Gage is a renowned stem cell scientists at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, which also wrote about his new role.

Gage was the first to show that people do, in fact, produce new brain cells after birth. In work that is especially close to my heart, he also showed that mice that get (to quote the 1999 press release) "regular voluntary exercise on running wheels" also grow more brain cells than sedentary mice.

More recently, Gage has had CIRM funding to carry out studies modeling human neurological diseases in a lab dish as a way of understanding and treating those diseases. We've blogged about his work here and here.

As the new president of ISSCR, which represents about 4,000 stem cell scientists internationally, Gage said he hoped to advocate for stem cell science to the public and to politicians. He also hopes to advance ISSCR's mission of moving basic stem cell discoveries into clinical therapies. He told the North County Times:

"There's been a lot of fantastic basic research that has been done," Gage said. "We realize that part of our mission as a society is to translate these basic science into clinical applications. We call it bench to bedside. We're thinking about ways to do this most effectively."…

"You have to have the basic biologists helping in this, but we need the clinicians too, even though they don't have the (scientific) knowledge," Gage said. "We need to bring them up to speed. And underlying all this, we need to have a very effective fundraising effort for the society."

Gage talked to CIRM about how stem cells can be used to mimic disease in a lab dish:



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CIRM grantee Robert Blelloch wins ISSCR Outstanding Young Investigator Award

CIRM grantee Robert Blelloch of the University of California, San Francisco won the 2011 Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Stem Cell Research. The society's annual meeting is taking place now in Toronto.

Blelloch presented his research June 15 at 6pm and will participate in a press briefing at noon June 16. His work focuses on the role of small molecules called microRNAs and their role in stem cell biology and cancer.

Jennifer O'Brien described Blelloch's work in a press release from UCSF:

During the last few years, Blelloch’s team has reported several key findings. In 2008, they reported that microRNAs promote self renewal of embryonic stem cells in mice (Nature Genetics, 2008). In 2009, they showed that when those same microRNAs were inserted into adult cells the cells de-differentiated back into embryonic stem cells (Nature Biotechnology, 2009). In 2010, they inserted a microRNA into embryonic stem cells and promoted differentiation, but determined that the microRNA had to compete with microRNAs that promote embryonic stem cell self-renewal (Nature, 2010). This year, his laboratory has been looking at microRNAs as a potential tool to systematically dissect the molecular pathways that regulate cell fate transitions, including dedifferentiation of adult cells to create induced pluripotent stem cells (Nature Biotechnology, 2011).

“People have come to realize microRNAs are remarkably powerful,” said Blelloch, associate professor in the Departments of Urology, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences and Pathology and a member of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Using microRNAs for therapeutic purposes has great potential , he said. “They could be used either to induce adult cells to de-differentiate to embryonic stem cells, which could be expanded, manipulated and returned to a patient, or to promote differentiation of embryonic stem cells to produce tissues that would remain integrated in the body once re-introduced.” They also could be used to target cancers, and they attract interest from biotechnology companies.

Blelloch has a SEED Award and a New Faculty II Award, both looking at the role of microRNAs in embryonic stem cell biology. Not to blow our own horn, but CIRM does know how to pick high quality research. Last year Stanford's Joanna Wysocka won the same award. She has a SEED Award and a New Faculty I Award from CIRM.

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ISSCR public symposium: Hope, passion and restraint for stem cell clinical trials

The annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research is Mecca for the hardcore stem cell research community. The next four days will be filled with intense and detailed discussions of all of the molecular details of how stem cells work--details we need to understand to move stem cells into the clinic effectively and safely.

But last night, as always, the meeting officially started with a symposium designed specifically for the public. For the third year I have had the pleasure of being on the planning committee for this event and this year we decided the field was ready to discuss clinical trials. We chose the title “The Stem Cell Promise: Moving to the Clinic” and decided to alternate brief talks by patient advocates and scientists/clinicians. Here is a list of speakers from the event.

What a rapt full house of attendees heard was an impassioned evening of hope and excitement balanced nicely with restraint and patient persistence. Early on California’s spinal cord injury advocate Roman Reed reminded the audience that the Geron trial, the first using cells derived from embryonic stem cells, is really about safety, not someone getting up out of a wheel chair. But at the same time he urged everyone in the audience to become an active advocate; to write to their legislatures to make sure this work gets funded: “Take a stand for research; take a stand for stem cells, so that one day we all can stand.”

Michael Fehling, a neurosurgeon at Toronto West Hospital, acknowledged that if scientists are going to design the perfect trial there's more they need to know about how neuronal progenitor cells will behave at the site of an injury. But he said, “You don’t have to have all the answers,” adding that most scientists believe our knowledge level is ready to begin clinical work. He admonished those in the field to make sure they learn from clinical trials and any information they can glean from how the cells perform in patients to direct a new wave of basic research to learn more of the answers needed to design a better trail. “We need reverse translational research.”

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Costa Rica strikes against false hope

Many people in the stem cell community and at CIRM have been concerned about the growing trend of stem cell tourism -- people going overseas to receive unproven "stem cell" therapies. The term Stem Cells is in quotes here because in general these clinics are less than open about what, exactly, the therapy entails. One tourism destination in Costa Rica owned by an Arizona entrepreneur was just shut down by the country's Health Ministry. According to a story in Reuters the treatments cost between $5,000 and $30,000.

We'd love nothing more than to see people truly healed by stem cell therapies, but the only way to get there is through good research and clinical trials that prove a therapy's safety and effectiveness. Clinics such as the one in Costa Rica profit off of people's hopes without offering a verifiably effective therapy.

The International Society for Stem Cell Research provides some helpful information on stem cell therapies, and how to avoid clinics that misrepresent what their therapies can do. You can download it here: http://www.isscr.org/public/

We also have a video with CIRM grantee and Scripps faculty member Jeanne Loring discussing her concerns about the practice of stem cell tourism.



If you want to learn more about stem cell tourism you can attend the public seminar in San Francisco on June 15, in which a panel of stem cell scientists will discuss with the audience the safe path to the clinic. Information about that panel is available here. A video of that discussion will also be posted on the CIRM web site.

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