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.
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.’”
