***Correction: In this article, The Daily inaccurately reported that the Department of Medicine recently gave $200,000 to the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. In truth, it was the School of Medicine that supplied the $200,000 grant, which was given to four researchers within the Institute.***

Ethical questions surrounding stem cell research might still be a hot topic of debate across the country and in Washington, but with a recent grant of $200,000 to the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, the University’s stance on the issue is clear.

“The Department of Medicine [which supplied the grant] usually doesn’t do this,” said Associate Professor of Medicine Judith Shizuru, who heads one of the four labs in the institute that will receive the funding. “It’s really a very strong sort of comment on the institution’s commitment to this field of stem cell biology and the development of therapies that can be derived from stem cells.”

Shizuru said that the funds would mainly serve as a platform to achieve a much larger grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).

“The CIRM put out a request for applications to apply for a bigger grant, which will go in the summer of 2008,” she said. “But when you’re trying to get a team of people together, you need resources and money to get your infrastructure together. In my case, we would use the money from the Department of Medicine for preliminary data.”

Stanford’s stem cell research institute has already received $41 million in funding from CIRM, more than any other institute. Most of the previous support has gone toward funding new approaches to stem cell diagnosis and treatment, emphasizing stem cell biology. Some of the funding has even gone into investigator awards and facility grants.

But Shizuru said that the new grant, which could be as large as $20 million, explicitly seeks to fund studies leading toward clinical trials.

“The new money is specifically for projects that the CIRM would like to see, where there’s a team of individuals working specifically to develop a clinical study that will be performed in the next two to four years,” she said.

Shizuru herself would use the CIRM funding to study transplantation of pure hematopoietic stem cells for treatment of the autoimmune disease known as scleroderma. Stanford will be competing with many other California stem cell research institutions, including those in the University of California system, for the grant.

Other sources of funding for the University include the National Institutes of Health, as well as smaller, more disease-specific groups, such as the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the American Cancer Society and the Diabetes Foundation.