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Rady Children’s Researchers Receive Grant to Study Neurological Disorders

Grant approved by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine

SAN DIEGO, April 1, 2013 – The governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has awarded Dr. Joseph Gleeson, a neurologist at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego and professor of neurosciences at UC San Diego, and Dr. Keith Vaux, pediatric hospitalist at Rady Children’s and professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego, a grant for $874,135 to study childhood neurodevelopmental disorders.

The grant is part of CIRM’s Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell (hiPSC) Initiative, an effort to develop and advance research into reprogramming cells, such as skin, into pluripotent stem cells that can then be differentiated into other functional cell types, such as neurons. In this case, the grant focuses upon creating and operating long-term repositories of high quality stem cell lines representing different diseases that can be used by researchers everywhere.

The grant is one of nine the CIRM board approved to create and store 9,000 cell lines from 3,000 individuals representing 11 diseases at a total cost of $32.3 million. The research will focus on children with brain disorders that have symptoms combining autism, cerebral palsy and epilepsy, suggesting underlying and shared mechanisms of dysfunction. Dr. Gleeson, Dr. Vaux and colleagues aim to identify 500 patients with these disorders, primarily from Rady Children’s. The goal is to develop a database of biological, medical, radiographic and genetic information that can be used to study stem cell mechanisms of disease and design therapeutic interventions.

Please call 858-822-3538 for information or to participate.

About Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego:
Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego is a 475-bed pediatric care facility providing the largest source of comprehensive pediatric medical services in San Diego, Southern Riverside and Imperial counties. Rady Children’s is the only hospital in the San Diego area dedicated exclusively to pediatric healthcare and is the region’s only designated pediatric trauma center. In June 2012, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rady Children’s among the best children’s hospitals in the nation in all ten pediatric specialties the magazine surveyed, including #2 in Orthopedics. For more information, visit www.rchsd.org and find us on Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube.