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"ENORMOUS PROMISE":
Pizzo will review research proposals.
News Service |
three days after California
voters approved an initiative to fund stem cell research
in the state, Medical School Dean Philip Pizzo was named
to a committee that will oversee the enterprise.
Pizzo was the first appointee to the 29-member Independent
Citizens Oversight Committee (ICOC), which will include
scientists, biotech leaders and patient advocates. The
committee will review requests for loans and grants,
and then make funding recommendations about proposed
embryonic and adult stem cell research projects to the
new California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
“I think we’re at an important crossroads,
with extraordinary science emanating from the last 50
or 60 years, and with great opportunities in the future,
cast against a health care system that is pretty disturbed
and altered in terms of its capacity,” Pizzo says.
“Trying to align those is something I’m
committed to doing, and I have felt that there is an
enormous amount of promise in stem cell research.”
Approved by nearly 60 percent of voters in November,
Proposition 71 authorizes the state to borrow $3 billion
over the next 10 years to fund stem cell research. The
$295 million that will be available annually dwarfs
the $25 million that the National Institutes of Health
spends each year on stem cell research. An August 2001
presidential decision restricts the use of federal funds
for embryonic stem cell research to pre-existing cell
lines, which are scarce, often expensive and do not
always have the characteristics that researchers need
to test treatments for particular diseases. Prop. 71
funds do not carry such restrictions.
Embryonic stem cell research is controversial. The cells
can differentiate into any kind of tissue, forming the
tissues and organs of the entire human body. Many scientists
believe research with embryonic stem cells carries greater
promise for curing major degenerative diseases than
does research involving the less versatile adult stem
cells. But some people are strongly opposed to creating
new embryonic stem cell lines in the laboratory because
harvesting them destroys the blastocyst, a ball of cells
that they consider a formative human life.
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LAB LINK: Weissman predicts
two research breakthroughs in five years.
News Service |
Because Stanford researchers likely will be among those
standing in line with proposals for Prop. 71 funding,
Pizzo will have to manage two hats. “My position
is that we are custodians of the future, both of our
University as well as community,” he says. “What
that means is that each of us needs to take a very broad
look and ask the question about how our entire community,
the state of California, will best benefit. I think
that my goal is to foster in my day job everything I
can to make Stanford an even greater institution. And
I view my chore on the ICOC to make sure I can do my
very best for the state of California, of which Stanford
is part.”
Pizzo and pathology professor Irving Weissman believe
that members of the peer-review committee that will
oversee the ICOC must come from outside the state. “We
have to make sure we have a wise scientific group who
can tell the difference between opportunists and real
scientists, because opportunists are coming out of the
woodwork,” says Weissman, who conducts cutting-edge
cancer research with adult stem cells. “I’ve
never seen so many people, even at my own university,
who now tell me that they are stem cell biologists.
It’s sick.”
Weissman, who directs Stanford’s Institute for
Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, predicts that
Prop. 71 will facilitate two breakthroughs in the next
five years. “One is to understand, using straight
old human embryonic stem cells, how to make a heart
stem cell or a skeletal muscle stem cell or an insulin-producing
stem cell. Once you know how that works, you might be
able to isolate that cell, even from adult humans, or
make it from embryonic stem cell lines for direct transplantation.”
The other, he says, is to master the technology to make
embryonic stem cell lines by transplanting into unfertilized
eggs the nuclei of body cells—perhaps from patients
with Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s or diabetes.
Pizzo predicts that research projects will emerge from
collaborations at Bio-x, Stanford’s interdisciplinary
starship, and he thinks the funding available through
Proposition 71 will help the University recruit scientists.
“Tons of people have e-mailed me saying, ‘By
the way, I’m available,’” says Weissman,
who has talked with researchers at Harvard and MIT as
well as scientists from Japan, Australia, Canada and
England. “I can say to people, ‘Look, if
this is what you want to do for the rest of your scientific
life, and if you want to do it in a way that translates
to medical knowledge and even medical therapies, then
you should be in California. And if you’re going
to come to California, then Stanford’s a great
place.’”
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