Monday, June 04, 2007

CIRM Tonight: Juggling $48 Million in Lab Grants

The California stem cell institute meets this evening to hand out as much as $48.5 million for laboratories for embryonic stem cell research.

A news conference is scheduled for noon on Tuesday to announce CIRM's actions, but it is likely to be mostly settled by 9 p.m. PDT or so tonight. We will carry a report following the end of the meeting.

The ultimate decision on the grants is made by the Oversight Committee of the institute, which is the group meeting this evening. But it has been loathe to make significant changes in grant recommendations by its working groups.

The 22 applications were reviewed by two CIRM working groups –- one that focused on facilities and one that was more oriented towards the research.

Recommended for funding by both the facilities and grants working groups are grants to the Salk Institute, Buck Institute, Burnham Institute, Gladstone Institute, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco and USC.

No funding was recommended on applications from UC Riverside and the Palo Alto Institute of Medicine by both the facilities and grants groups.

The facilities group recommended no funding for UC Santa Barbara, but the grants group gave it a favorable recommendation.

Negative recommendations were made by the grants group on applications from Scripps, Cedars-Sinai, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, Beckman Research Institute (City of Hope), Blood Systems Research Institute (San Francisco) and California Pacific Medical Center Research Insitute (San Francisco). But facilities group gave these insitutions a favorable recommendation.

Copies of the applications, rankings and much, much more can be found here.

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