Millions for NE Ohio stem-cell center

Northeast Ohio yesterday won the first installment on a stem-cell research and regenerative medicine center that, its backers hope, will lure millions of dollars more and lead to amazing new treatments for debilitating diseases.

The stem-cell center received the biggest grant from the Biomedical Research and Technology Transfer Commission, a state panel that guides how Ohio spends its share of a multistate tobacco settlement trust fund. In total, the panel gave three proposals almost $25 million.

More than $8.5 million of that went to the stem-cell proposal. Another $11 million more is expected to flow to the center by mid-June from a different state program that boosts a few major high-tech projects trying to get products to market.

The proposal is one of the most significant developments in Cleveland's biotech industry. The size of the market for regenerative therapy - which include disorders affecting the heart, brain, muscles, bones and other tissues - is more than $5 billion and growing.

"It puts us on the edge of what could be a revolutionary stage in medicine," said James Wagner, provost of Case Western Reserve University. Calling yesterday's grant "catalytic money," Wagner predicted the center would lead to other economic development opportunities.

Supporters plan to tap sources of federal money, including grants from the National Institutes of Health. Within five years, the center hopes to draw $30 million to $40 million a year, most of that in federal money, said its director, Stan Gerson, a professor of medicine at CWRU who heads the oncology and hematology division at University Hospitals of Cleveland.

CWRU, which has the center's leading role, will work closely with UH, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Athersys Inc. and other companies and institutions.

Instead of focusing research in one site, the proposal calls for the major partners to work in their own labs.

Athersys won exclusive rights last year to license stem cell technology discovered at the University of Minnesota. Athersys and its chief executive, Gil Van Bokkelen, pushed the concept of a regenerative medicine center here. Of the $8.6 million awarded yesterday, Athersys will get almost $5 million.

It is not expected to share in the $10.9 million the project should receive within weeks from the other state program, the Wright Centers of Innovation.

Yesterday, Ohio made the first of the Wright awards, totaling more than $9 million, to a biomedical imaging project headed by Ohio State University. That project, which includes CWRU, Cleveland-based Philips Medical Systems and others, also got $8 million from the Biomedical Research and Technology Transfer Commission.

CWRU is also involved in the third proposal blessed by the commission, a neurostimulation project that got $7.9 million. A gene-based drug discovery project from Cleveland-based Chan Test Inc., which requested $6.3 million, didn't get any money.