Genentech Hall, UCSF, and the UCLA Medical Center

Any city in California can now bid to become the home base of the $3 billion stem cell research project authorized by Proposition 71 due to changes made yesterday by the subcommittee responsible for searching for the location for that organization, as long as it can meet the other requirements specified in the Request for Proposals now on track to be issued by the ICOC on February 7, 2005.

Meeting for the first time at 11:00 am PST on Tuesday, January 25, 2005, in Room 114 in Genentech Hall at the University of California in San Francisco, with audioconferencing connections to other sites at UCLA, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and the University of California at Davis, the Site Search Subcommittee of the Independent Citizens' Oversight Committee (ICOC), established by California voters in November, 2004, when they passed Proposition 71 by a 3-2 ratio, to control the operations of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), which will administer the dispersal of the $3 billion in bond-sale generated funds also authorized under Proposition 71, decided to expand the locations now eligible to win the coveted title of "Home of the CIRM" from, as was stated in the first draft of its proposed RFP, "close to a major center of biomedical research in the Los Angeles Basin, the San Francisco Bay Area, or the San Diego Metropolitan Area," to according to ICOC and Site Search Subcommittee member Sherry Lansing, "any place in the State of California" that can meet the other specified requirements for becoming the site of the CIRM's headquarters.

The location of the CIRM's main offices will, according to Ms. Lansing, the outgoing Chairman of Paramount Pictures, no longer "be limited to those three cities."