The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s stem cell agency, has awarded $25 million in support of the first FDA-approved human clinical trial based on cells derived from human embryonic stem cells. The treatment was created in the lab of Hans Keirstead, a neurobiologist with UCI’s Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center. The grant to Menlo Park-based Geron Corp. will support its ongoing early-phase trial on people with spinal cord injury. One individual has already received injections of the cells at a site in Georgia. This is the first time CIRM, which was created by the passage of Proposition 71 in 2004, has funded a human clinical trial of a stem cell-derived therapy.