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Stanford Medicine News Center - March 26th, 2015
Matthew Porteus, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, was awarded $1 million today from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to pursue a stem-cell-based gene therapy approach to correcting a form of severe combined immunodeficiency (also known as SCID, or “bubble boy disease”) in humans.
The award was part of the state stem cell agency’s Preclincal Development Awards. Seven awards were granted, for a total of $25.2 million. The agency said in a statement that the awards support “projects that use or target stem cells, have shown potential in early stage research and are now ready to move one step closer to clinical trials in people.”
“This investment will let us further test the early promise shown by these projects,” said Jonathan Thomas, PhD, JD, head of the agency’s governing board in the statement. “Preclinical work is vital in examining the feasibility, potential effectiveness and safety of a therapy before we try it on people. These projects all showed compelling evidence that they could be tremendously beneficial to patients. We want to help them build on that earlier research and move the projects to the next level.”
With this award, Stanford has received a total of around $297 million from CIRM.
