One thing that has always set California apart is our drive to innovate. That spirit is part of our DNA. It's evident all across California in everything from business to the environment to public policy.

That drive to innovate is what led voters to create the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and its charter to invest in stem cell research. The goal was clear: Keep California, its universities and biotech industry on the forefront of this most promising area of innovation in health care.

The potential of stem cells to treat serious diseases and life-altering conditions is enormous. There is no doubt that, in the relatively near future, the brilliant research scientists and innovative biotech companies across our state will create breakthrough treatments that will benefit both patients and our economy.

Recently, CIRM has taken this innovation one step further: By establishing nothing less than a new approach to advanced scientific research that will once again help keep California in the lead. Last week, CIRM awarded $229 million to 14 "disease team" projects.

For the past three years, CIRM has awarded hundreds of millions in grants, making us the largest source of funding for human embryonic stem cell research in the world.

But for a state used to the startling pace of innovation in the electronics and software industries, the pace of advances in stem cell therapies has been puzzlingly slow to many people. In part, that's because of the fundamental nature of the science; medicine doesn't move as fast as technology.

In part, however, that has been directly related to how we have organized the entire process.

Traditionally, this kind of research happens in a linear fashion. It begins at one end, in an academic research lab, to identify things that might help treat one disease or condition. That moves one step at a time toward larger scale research, then the involvement of the private sector, then development of a potential commercial treatment that can be tested in a proper clinical trial. All this takes a great deal of time – right now, an average of 12 years. And that doesn't even take into account the approval process if the treatment proves successful.

We can't change the fundamental rules of science. But we can change the way in which we organize our research efforts. We can create a significantly new approach that will greatly accelerate the timetable for moving a potential stem cell treatment from lab to clinical trial to just four years.

To do that takes two things.

First, it takes cooperation and collaboration. What's missing in the traditional research approach is something that other industries have already learned: involvement of the entire spectrum of participants from the beginning.

CIRM's new approach is to award grants to "teams" focused on specific diseases. These teams combine people and organizations across the spectrum of basic and clinical research into a single research unit. In many cases, there will be significant participation by scientists from the private sector – the people whose job would be to turn research into treatments. Several of the teams also have international partnerships bringing in the best minds from around the world.

By working together from the beginning, these teams can help focus the research on the areas that are most promising, spotting potential roadblocks to clinical trial early in the process, rather than years along, and ensure the collaboration of the best experts in the world, so that we will have the best possible treatments in trials within those four years.

Second, it takes funding, enough of it, and with a long-term vision. Thanks to CIRM and the voters of California, we have the ability to underwrite this kind of cooperative, multiyear research – as much as $20 million for each four-year award. There are no other funding organizations in the country that are able to make this kind of investment in stem cell innovation.

We don't yet know what researchers will discover. But we do know that, whatever they discover, this new approach to science means we will be able to turn it into viable treatments for people much, much faster than ever before. That will move stem cells from the promise of new therapies to delivering on that promise for the people of California.

And that's exactly what the voters wanted when they created CIRM: for it to reflect the innovative leadership that is this state.