Program Type: Translation
{REDACTED} Cardiovascular Regenerative Team
Heart failure affects 5 million patients in the U.S., representing the most common cause of hospital admission and resulting in 300,000 deaths annually. Despite aggressive treatment with advanced pharmacotherapies and implantable devices, the 5-year survival is only 50%. Cardiac transplantation is limited to 2,000 patients per year due to the lack of suitable donors. Therefore, […]
Genetically-modified neural stem cells for treatment of high-grade glioma
Our proposal details assembly of a multidisciplinary Disease Team whose goal will be to take into the clinic a novel and promising stem cell-based strategy for selectively targeting invasive tumor cells in high-grade glioma. These tumor cells form small foci scattered throughout the brain that are resistant to standard treatments and are the tumor in […]
CIRM Planning Grant in Leukemia
Leukemias are cancers of the blood forming cells that afflict both children and adults. Many drugs have been developed to treat leukemias and related diseases, but in many cases of adult leukemia, the diseases are not curable, and cause disability and eventual death. More than in other cancers, scientists understand the exact molecular changes in […]
“Stem Cell Therapies for Heart Failure”
Our multi-institutional program is dedicated to the treatment of heart failure, which has become a leading cause of death in California and the U. S. The high death toll continues to climb despite many significant recent advances in the medical treatment of heart failure. The disease is due to a debilitating loss and/or dysfunction of […]
STEM CELL GENE THERAPY FOR SICKLE CELL DISEASE
Sickle cell disease (SCD), which results from an inherited mutation in the hemoglobin gene that causes red blood cells to “sickle” under conditions of low oxygen, occurs with a frequency of 1/500 African-Americans, and is also common in Hispanic-Americans, who comprise up to 5% of SCD patients in California. The median survival based on 1991 […]
{REDACTED} Heart Disease Regenerative Medicine Team Planning Award
The present planning grant application lays the groundwork for a collaborative heart disease regenerative medicine team. We plan to develop sequential preclinical and clinical investigations directed at regenerative stem cell-based approaches to treating the following major cardiovascular diseases: heart attack and its sequelae; congestive heart failure; and heart block requiring a pacemaker. The basic foundation […]
Huntington’s Disease Team
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a devastating degenerative brain disease with a 1 in 10,000 risk of having a mutation that inevitably leads to death. These numbers do not fully reflect the large societal and familial cost of HD, which requires extensive caregiving. HD has no effective treatment or cure and symptoms progress without stopping for […]
Stem Cell-Mediated Oncocidal Therapy of Primary & Metastatic Brain Tumors
Brain tumors (BTs) are incurable, whether they start in the brain or spread there from other sites (e.g., lung, colon, breast, skin). Indeed, the latter situation is even more common & often more frustrating – although we’ve made inroads in treating such non-neural cancers, once brain metastases are discovered, hope is largely abandoned. Current therapies […]
CIRM Disease Team Planning Award
Children born with sickle cell anemia (SCA), caused by a genetic defect in hemoglobin, have severe anemia and damage to virtually all the body organs: the damage begins in infancy, and is frequently fatal by early adulthood. This is one of the most common inherited diseases in the world: because of California’s ethnic diversity it […]
Stem cells for neuroprotection of photoreceptors in retinitis pigmentosa
The targeted disease is retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a severe form of blindness that runs in families. This disease is not common, yet represents an attractive near term target for stem cell therapy for a number of reasons: 1) RP destroys the light detecting cells of the retina but generally leaves the rest of the visual […]