Public event brought together stem cell scientists and the public

Geoff Symmonds of Calimmune was available to
answer questions about HIV/AIDS research

Geoff Symonds of Calimmune, shown here, is just one of about 20 scientists who attended a public symposium last Thursday night to answer questions about our disease therapies.

We held the event as part of our semi-annual grantee meeting, which brings together stem cell scientists from throughout California (plus some international collaborators) to talk about their science. The goal of the meeting is to encourage scientists to talk through roadblocks and brainstorm new ideas for getting their therapies to patients.

We figured as long as we had all those people together in one place, why not hold a public event to give the people who supported proposition 71 a chance to learn about the progress we’ve made.

Members of the public and scientists
talking around disease-focused posters

For about half an hour, people were able to talk to scientists and read posters we’d prepared on the different disease areas we fund. (The same information is available on these disease pages on our website.)

As I talked to people during this session I met a man who had come to learn more about our diabetes programs, and who had a companion pet. He didn’t appear to be blind, so I asked about his dog. What I learned is that some people with diabetes can’t feel when their blood sugar is getting low—and if they forget to check their blood sugar the consequences could be fatal. His dog was trained to sense low blood sugar, which animals can smell, and grab a little tag on his collar to let his owner know to check his blood sugar.

I thought about him as I heard a talk later by Eugene Brandon of ViaCyte. That company has several awards from CIRM to develop a novel therapy for diabetes. Brandon started by showing this video that we produced a few years ago about ViaCyte’s science and the need for a new therapy:

The man I’d talked to earlier could easily have been one of the people in this video, talking about the many difficulties of living with diabetes. I noticed that he spoke with Brandon about ViaCyte's project after the talks.

You can see a list of scientists who spoke at the event on the website (look under the speakers tab). We’ll be posting videos of those talks for those who missed the event.

Here are images of three posters we had up during the first portion of the event describing our overall funding strategy, our worldwide collaborative funding program and our progress toward therapies.

A.A.