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The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has set ambitious goals in its new 5-year strategic plan. Made possible by renewed funding through Proposition 14, the plan lays out a roadmap for CIRM as the agency continues to advance world class science, deliver real world solutions, and provide opportunity for all.

In regenerative medicine (and many other fields), the lack of protocol standardization and lack of analytical toolkits make it difficult to access novel and reliable technology platforms.

CIRM recognizes these limitations, and as a response, the Agency has made it a goal in the “Prop 14 era” to develop next-generation competency hubs that empower and connect California’s research ecosystem.

One example of such competency hubs is the shared labs. The concept of shared labs isn’t new to CIRM. In fact, CIRM has awarded a total of 17 shared research laboratory grants to academic and nonprofit research institutions to provide lab space for innovative stem cell research and training.

CIRM will expand this shared lab model by creating networks of specialized competency hubs that offer knowledge and/or materials in cell and gene therapy development. These hubs will encourage collaborations and provide intra- and inter-institutional access to various competencies by sharing facilities, training, equipment, materials, protocols, and/or expertise.

As an example, a disease modeling competency hub would provide access to innovative models used to study diseases, collaborative researchers, shared facilities for conducting research, equipment and training programs for deriving or differentiating cell lines, etc. These collaborative environments would encourage researchers to work together with a team science approach, which would significantly accelerate discovery and therapy development.

Some of these hubs will also serve as a workforce training program for local and neighboring institutions. Most California state universities and community colleges have neither the financial nor experiential bandwidth for innovative research. They may, however, harbor a potentially diverse future workforce who could learn these techniques and use the technology platforms for small scale research. Training may also trigger the interest of the future workforce in pursuing the field of regenerative medicine.  

The competency hubs will also constitute part of the CIRM collaborative ecosystem making all their data available through the CIRM data infrastructure hub, also known as CIRM knowledge networks.

Finally, the network of competency hubs will greatly benefit the people of California by expanding geographic access to diverse communities and providing researchers with a unique opportunity of exposure to state-of-the-art platforms.

Visit this page to learn more about CIRM’s new 5-year Strategic Plan, and stay tuned as we share progress updates on our 5-year goals here on the Stem Cellar.