CIRM awards $9m to Enloe Health for Northern California CGT centre
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has approved a $9 million grant to Enloe Health in Chico, California, to establish a Community Care Centre of Excellence (CCCE) that will bring FDA-approved cell and gene therapies, as well as clinical trial access, closer to patients in Northern California. The centre is expected to open by January 2027.
The new site will initially focus on delivering approved CAR-T cell therapies and enrolling patients in clinical trials targeting blood cancers, autoimmune diseases, and rare genetic disorders. Enloe Health will also operate patient support services and run workforce training programmes to build local clinical capacity.
Expanding California's Clinical Network
The CCCE programme was launched by CIRM in 2025 as an access-focused initiative designed to reduce the distance patients must travel to reach regenerative medicine services, which have historically been concentrated in large academic medical centres. CIRM's first wave of CCCEs received a combined $27 million to establish sites serving South Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and Desert Region, and the Central Valley.
With the Enloe Health site added, CIRM says its Clinical Network, comprising four CCCEs and nine Alpha Clinics, now puts advanced therapies and clinical trials within a 90-minute drive for roughly nine in ten Californians. Shyam Patel, CIRM's Associate Vice President of Patient Access, said the expansion was about ensuring that geography does not determine who benefits from next-generation treatments. "Every person in California should be able to access the most promising medical advances, including cell and gene therapies that are changing what is possible for serious and life-threatening diseases," he said.
Addressing access barriers beyond geography
CIRM's model goes further than physical proximity. Alongside the Clinical Network, the agency runs a Patient Support Programme that provides financial assistance to help Californians overcome practical barriers to trial participation, including transport costs, food, housing, and childcare. The programme is currently limited to participants in CIRM-funded trials.
Maria Gonzalez Bonneville, CIRM Board Vice Chair and Chair of the Access and Affordability Working Group, said the Enloe site would "work with community partners to address informational, economic, and social barriers that can prevent people from participating in research."
The broader context matters here. CAR-T therapies, while curative for a meaningful proportion of patients with relapsed or refractory haematological malignancies, carry a substantial logistical burden. Administration requires specialist facilities equipped for cytokine release syndrome management, and patients are often required to remain near a treatment centre for weeks after infusion. Rural and semi-rural populations have historically been under-represented in both clinical trials and real-world use of these therapies, a disparity that has attracted growing attention from payers, regulators, and patient advocacy groups in the United States and Europe.
CIRM was established under California's Proposition 71 in 2004 and recapitalised by Proposition 14 in 2020, giving it a total allocation of $5.5 billion for stem cell and gene therapy research, infrastructure, and workforce development. The Enloe award forms part of that infrastructure mandate, signalling that CIRM's focus has moved beyond funding early-stage science toward ensuring clinical readiness and equitable deployment across the state.