California's stem cell funding agency giveth and it taketh away: Just last week, the agency awarded more than $250 million to stem cell researchers -- the largest research grant round in its five-year history -- but it also terminated three grants awarded in a previous round due to slow progress earlier this year.
The California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) identified the underperforming projects by reviewing grantees' first year progress reports. These are required by all CIRM grantees in a progress monitoring system that appears to be more rigorous than that of the National Institutes of Health. "The scientific staff are in frequent contact with our CIRM-supported PIs, assessing their progress towards the goals they were approved to pursue," CIRM director Floyd Bloom linkurl:told the California Stem Cell Report;http://californiastemcellreport.blogspot.com/2009/11/cscr-withholds-names-of-terminated.html (CSCR). "Lack of progress can be sufficient grounds to terminate the funding."...
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Image: Wikimedia commons, Nissim Benvenisty |
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