California's stem cell agency granted $40 million Wednesday to study how the use of stem cells for therapy is affected by variations in the human genome.

The Center of Excellence for Stem Cell Genomics will be located at Stanford University. Competing proposals, including one by DNA sequencing giant Illumina and The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, were rejected by the California Institution for Regenerative Medicine.

Backers of the San Diego proposal said CIRM staff reviews of the proposals contained errors, such as including financial considerations when scientific merit was supposed to be the sole consideration. Stanford's proposal was highest-rated in the reviews.

The Stanford proposal earned praise from reviewers for the breadth of its research initiatives, from basic research to disease applications, along with the deep expertise of its scientists. Reviewers also liked the affiliated data management center, which will be located at UC Santa Cruz.

A number of San Diego research institutions will collaborate with Stanford's center. While the center itself will be placed at Stanford, the Salk Institute will participate as a joint principal investigator. The Scripps Research Institute and Illumina will also contribute, along with UC San Diego,and the J. Craig Venter Institute.

The Stanford proposal treats Illumina like a contractor, which doesnt make the best use of its abilities, said Scripps Research stem cell scientist Jeanne Loring, who attended the meeting. She submitted letters to the board from herself and Illumina explaining the project's benefits.

I was trying to tap into Illuminas intellectual power, which is often overlooked because they make most of their money by selling instruments and providing services, Loring said. But the people Id be working with are the ones who invented these technologies.

Illumina would benefit as a business by creating new markets, Loring said. For example, a test that tells whether stem cells have potentially dangerous mutations would be highly sought after.

Illumina pledged in a letter to CIRM that any products it sells under the agreement would be accessible, both in price and support.

Loring said she hopes the Scripps/Illumina proposal can still be funded, but there is no obvious alternative.

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Stanford stem cell genomics center funded

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Newswise Scientists from UCLAs Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research have received new awards from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the state stem cell research agency, that will forward revolutionary stem cell science in medicine.

Recipients included Dr. Lili Yang, assistant professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics who received $614,400 for her project to develop a novel system for studying how stem cells become rare immune cells; Dr. Denis Evseenko, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery, who received $1,146,468 for his project to identify the elements of the biological niche in which stem cells grow most efficiently into articular cartilage cells; Dr. Thomas Otis, professor and chair of neurobiology and Dr. Ben Novitch, assistant professor of neurobiology, who received $1,148,758 for their project using new light-based optigenetic techniques to study the communication between nerve and muscle cells in spinal muscular atrophy, an inherited degenerative neuromuscular disease in children; and Dr. Samantha Butler, assistant professor of neurobiology, received $598,367 for her project on discovering which molecular elements drive stem cells to become the neurons, or nerve cells, in charge of our sense of touch.

These basic biology grants form the foundation of the revolutionary advances we are seeing in stem cell science, said Dr. Owen Witte, professor and director of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center, and every cellular therapy that reaches patients must begin in the laboratory with ideas and experiments that will lead us to revolutionize medicine and ultimately improve human life. That makes these awards invaluable to our research effort.

The awards were part of CIRMs Basic Biology V grant program, carrying on the initiative to foster cutting-edge research on significant unresolved issues in human stem cell biology. The emphasis of this research is on unravelling the secrets of key mechanisms that determine how stem cells, which can become any cell in the body, differentiate, or decide which cell they become. By learning how these mechanisms work, scientists can then create therapies that drive the stem cells to regenerate or replace damaged or diseased tissue.

Using A New Method to Track Special Immune Cells All the different cells that make up the blood come from hematopoietic or blood stem cells. These include special white blood cells called T cells, which serve as the foot soldiers of the immune system, attacking bacteria, viruses and other invaders that cause diseases.

Among the T cells is a smaller group of cells called invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells, which have a remarkable capacity to mount immediate and powerful responses to disease when activated, a small special forces unit among the foot soldiers, and are believed to be important to immune system regulation of infections, allergies, cancer and autoimmune diseases such as Type I diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

The iNKT cells develop in small numbers in the blood, usually less than 1 percent of all the blood cells, and can differ greatly in numbers between individuals. Very little is known about how the blood stem cells produce iNKT cells.

Dr. Lili Yangs project will develop a novel model system to genetically program human blood stem cells to become iNKT cells. Dr. Yang and her colleagues will track the differentiation of human blood stem cells into iNKT cells providing a pathway to answer many critical questions about iNKT cell development.

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Stem Cell Agency Helps Set the Stage for Revolutionary Medicine