The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) announced 22 New Faculty Awards yesterday (Dec 12) while releasing the names of five institutions from which applications were rejected for apparent conflicts of interest.

The grants, awarded to young researchers at institutions throughout the state, total more than $54 million, bringing the amount of research dollars awarded by California's stem cell agency to $260 million since its 2004 inception.

The institute confirmed it had rejected applications from the University of California, San Francisco, UC San Diego, UCLA, and the University of Southern California. News reports, including ours, identified these schools previously, but the CIRM board verified the names of the institutions at a meeting to announce the award winners, yesterday at UCLA.

Richard Murphy, CIRM's interim president, said at the meeting that, "These were innocent, inadvertent mistakes," according to a report in the North County Times, a California newspaper.

The CIRM board named the Burnham Institute for Medical Research as the fifth organizations from which a New Faculty Award application was rejected. Recently, John Reed, CEO of the Burnham Institute and CIRM board member, has been criticized for attempting to overturn a CIRM decision not to award a Burnham researcher a $638,000 SEED grant. On Monday, California's Fair Political Practices Commission announced that it would investigate the incident.

Reed did not participate in yesterday's announcement of the New Faulty Award winners as he has said he will not participate in CIRM board activities while he is being investigated.