Is CIRM Pushing Money Out the Door Fast Enough? A Look at the Money Trail

Amount awarded for research is substantially less than budgeted

CIRM prepared the above chart for a meeting of its Science Subcommittee tomorrow afternoon. It shows what CIRM budgeted annually for research awards and how much was actually awarded (committed).

California’s stem cell and gene therapy program has access to $540 million each year, so why has the agency awarded only 72 percent of that amount for research in recent years? Is it saving money to prolong its life? Or perhaps it can’t find enough worthy research in the Golden State?

Those are questions, among others, that should be addressed at tomorrow’s meeting of the Science Subcommittee of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), as the stem cell agency is formally known.

On the table formally at the meeting is $147 million that would go for research during the first six months of next year.  However, what caught the attention of the California Stem Cell Report were figures that laid out the budgeted research spending from 2021-22 through 2024-25 and compared it to the actual amount awarded by the CIRM board.  (2025 is an estimate by CIRM.)

The total awarded -- CIRM uses the word committed -- each fiscal year averaged $316 million, according to our calculations, far below what the 35-member CIRM board had approved for spending. In other words, the CIRM board, from 2021-22 through June 2025, budgeted $1.8 billion million for research. But its awards total only $1.3 billion over the same period, only 72 percent of what had been budgeted.

Why is this important? It doesn’t save money.