August 2001
›› New guidelines signed by President Bush mandate that stem cell research be eligible for NIH funding only if investigators use one of 60 preexisting embryonic stem cell lines.

November 2004 
›› California passes Proposition 71, authorizing the state to borrow and spend $3 billion over 10 years to support stem cell research. 

December 2004
›› Keck School researcher Brian Henderson, then USC’s dean of medicine, is named to the governing committee of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), the funding agency created as a result of Prop. 71. 

January 2005
›› The Independent Citizens Oversight Committee, created by the passage of Prop. 71, holds its first public meeting at the Keck School.

March 2005 
›› Keck professors Laurie DeLeve and Zea Borok organize Stem Cell Research Day, featuring presentations by faculty from USC, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, Caltech, UC San Francisco and UC San Diego.

›› Zach Hall of the Keck School is appointed interim president of CIRM.

›› The Keck School hosts the first-ever CIRM stem cell research symposium.

September 2005 
›› Zach Hall is appointed permanent president of CIRM. He retires in 2007 due to illness.

December 2005 
›› Martin Pera, an internationally known authority on the development of human embryonic stem cells, is named director of the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School. 

February 2006 
›› USC receives $25 million from the Broad Foundation to construct a new building that will house the university’s stem cell research program.

April 2006 
›› Osiris Therapeutics Inc., announces it has completed enrollment for the first human clinical trial of a stem cell therapy to repair tissue in the knee. The lead investigator is C. Thomas Vangsness, professor of orthopedic surgery at USC.

›› USC and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles receive a three-year, $3.16 million stem cell training grant from CIRM to instruct graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and clinical fellows across 27 academic departments at USC.

October 2006 
›› A study by USC professor Richard Cote finds that almost all tumor cells found in the bone marrow of early-stage breast cancer patients appear to be breast cancer stem cells, suggesting the risk of disease spread for all breast cancer patients may be greater than previously thought.

February 2007 
›› USC hires four new stem cell researchers:  Wange Lu, who studies Ryk-mediated Wnt signaling and its functions in neural stem cell proliferation and differentiation; Gage Crump, who uses zebra fish to discover the local interactions that control skeletal differentiation and morphogenesis in vivo; Qi-Long Ying, whose research focuses on understanding how embryonic stem cells decide whether to self-renew or to differentiate; and Michael Kahn,a leader in the study of chemical genomics, which uses small molecules to probe cell regulatory networks.

›› USC receives $3.4 million for stem cell research from CIRM Scientific Excellence through Exploration and Development grants. USC proposals that were selected for funding include: therapeutic potential of retinal pigment epithelial cell lines derived from human embryonic stem cells for retinal degeneration (David Hinton); screening for oncogenic epigenetic alterations in human embryonic stem cells (Peter Laird); human embryonic stem cells as tools to investigate the neural crest origin of Ewing’s sarcoma (Elizabeth Lawlor); regulation of human neural progenitor cell proliferation by Ryk-mediated Wnt signaling (Wange Lu); and self-renewal of human embryonic stem cells (Qi-Long Ying).

March 2007 
›› A second round of 25 CIRM Comprehensive Research Grants, aimed at established stem cell scientists, is announced. The grants will be worth $80 million over four years.

›› A newly discovered molecule, IQ-1, is found to play a key role in preventing embryonic stem cells from differentiating into one or more specific cell types, allowing them to instead continue growing and dividing indefinitely, according to Keck research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Michael Kahn is the study’s primary investigator.

›› CIRM awards $2.5 million to Gay Crooks, Keck pediatrics professor and research scientist at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, for research on blood formation from stem cells.

April 2007 
›› USC School of Dentistry researcher Songtao Shi and collaborators in China and Korea discover that mesenchymal stem cells are capable of regenerating orofacial bone and soft tissue for cosmetic purposes in mouse and swine models. The study is published in the journal Stem Cell. 

›› The Harlyne J. Norris Cancer Research Tower opens. It provides a temporary home to USC’s growing Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine.

June 2007
›› The Keck School and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles are awarded $6.4 million in CIRM grants. The hospital receives $2.8 million to build a 3,000-square-foot centralized laboratory area. Another $3.6 million goes toward USC’s Center for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine and a 1,500-square-foot research lab in the new Harlyne J. Norris Cancer Research Tower.

›› Keck School researcher Martin Pera takes part in a publication of the first large-scale “encyclopedia” of human embryonic stem cell lines. The study appears in the July issue of Nature Biotechnology; it compares 59 lines of stem cells from 17 laboratories around the world.

October 2007
›› The Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation gives $10 million to create the USC Epigenome Center. Epigenetics is the study of how cell appearance and behavior are encoded without using genetics.

›› USC craniofacial researcher Songtao Shi and collaborators publish results of isolating a new stem cell population from tendon tissue in the journal Nature Medicine.

November 2007 
›› Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin announce a breakthrough, reprogramming human skin cells to act like embryonic stem cells without the use of human embryos.

›› Six research institutions across Southern California, including USC, join forces to advance stem cell research. They establish the Southern California Stem Cell Scientific Collaboration. 

December 2007
›› CIRM unveils $54 million in New Faculty Awards. Of this sum, $6.3 million goes to USC. A $3.25 million grant supports Songtao Shi’s work on oral and craniofacial reconstruction using mesenchymal stem cells; and a $2.9 million grant funds cardiologist Mohammad Pashmforoush’s bid to develop cell-based therapies to treat cardiac arrhythmias.