Breaking Ground: UCSF Builds Institute for Regeneration Medicine

In December 2002, a massive storm swept through the San Francisco Bay Area, knocking down trees and causing widespread power outages that lasted for days. Backup generators at UCSF went into effect, ensuring that patients, as well as biological materials and animals under study in research, were not affected. But the tiny, off-campus laboratory of UCSF human embryonic stem cell researcher Susan Fisher, PhD, was an exception. The lab had been set up recently by UCSF to comply with federal regulations prohibiting scientists from deriving new human embryonic stem cell lines in research buildings in which federally funded research was conducted. But PG&E wasn’t able to restore electricity to the site for several days. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Fisher and her team had just derived what were believed to be the first human embryonic stem cell lines nourished in cell culture on a bed of human cells. This was a major accomplishment. All of the embryonic stem cell lines included in the National Institutes of Health Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry, established by President Bush in August 2001, had been grown, and continue to be maintained, on mouse cells. As such, they could have been exposed to mouse viruses or other forms of contamination, making it unlikely that many, if any, of these original cell lines would ever meet the US Federal Drug Administration’s approval for use in transplantation therapy. Fisher’s new lines offered an option. But faced with the federal restriction of not being able to bring the cells onto the UCSF campus, the team had to watch the cells die. Today, Fisher says that loss set the lab back nearly two years. Fisher moved the stem cell component of her lab to one of the research project’s two funders — Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, California, a pioneer in the field. And for three years, members of her team made the 30-mile trek to the company several times a week, often in the middle of the night, due to the need to routinely tend to the cells. The commute to Menlo Park ended in 2006. Fisher is now director of the UCSF Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Center, part of the Institute for Regeneration Medicine. And her team carries out stem cell studies in the $5 million center, which was created with nonfederal funds so that human embryonic stem cell studies could take place on the campus. But her experience highlights the challenges UCSF scientists and administrators faced in the early days of human embryonic stem cell research. UCSF was one of the first two US universities — the other being the University of Wisconsin — to carry out the research. It did so, beginning in the late 1990s, under the shadow of both federal funding restrictions and legislation proposed by US Senator Sam Brownback that would have made somatic cell nuclear transfer, or therapeutic cloning, studies punishable by a 10-year prison term and a $1 million fine. Today, the UCSF institute is one of the largest regenerative medicine research enterprises in the United States, encompassing 125 labs made up of scientists exploring the earliest stages of animal and human development. The goal of these studies is to understand how disorders and diseases develop and how they could be treated with the knowledge of, and use of, stem cells and other early-stage cells. Also today, UCSF is again breaking ground — this time literally. A handful of bulldozers now move across the 75 degree slope of a hillside on the Parnassus Heights campus, setting the stage for a $123 million building. The structure will serve as the headquarters of the Institute for Regeneration Medicine, which will continue to include scientists based at all UCSF campuses. Funding for the building was jump-started in 2006 by a $16 million donation from Ray and Dagmar Dolby. Earlier this year, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), set up to support human embryonic stem cell research, awarded $34.9 million for the building. Today, fundraising continues. The building, which the CIRM evaluators described in their evaluation as “a breathtaking building that exudes collaboration and interaction,” is a metaphor for the field, says Arnold Kriegstein, MD, PhD, director of the institute. “It illustrates,” he says, “the evolution of the field against the political landscape.” To learn how to make a donation to the building, contact Bonnie Feinberg, UCSF Foundation, at 415/476-3953 or [email protected].