By Marisa Taylor

California Institute of Regenerative Medicine officials on Tuesday said they were confident their long legal battle to dole out $3 billion in stem cell research funding had come to an end after a California appeals court upheld the agency’s constitutionality.

A group of pro-life activists and anti-tax advocates, who claim the stem cell agency’s board members have conflicts of interest, are expected to appeal the decision to the state supreme court, but the CIRM and its attorneys contended that the higher court would almost surely reject an appeal.

“There’s nothing here for the Supreme Court to address,” said Tamar Patcher, the deputy attorney general of California, who was representing the CIRM in the case, in a conference call. “The Court of Appeal opinion is extremely painstaking and methodical and it is based on well-established law.”

The appeals court’s decision upheld an earlier lower court ruling in favor of the $3 billion stem cell research agency, which was created when Proposition 71 was approved by voters in 2004. The legal battle has stymied the state’s stem cell research initiative, proposed in response to the Bush administration’s restrictive stem cell research policies.

The agency has so far been unable to issue bonds to raise the $3 billion it is authorized to allocate to stem cell research. The state government and private donors have in the meantime loaned the agency more than $200 million to move forward while the court battle continues.

The CIRM last week awarded its first embryonic stem cell research grants, with a total of $45 million awarded to 20 institutions in California, and the institute hopes to approve a second set of grants for $80 million on March 16.

The California Family Bioethics Council claims the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee, CIRM’s governing board, is not a public entity, and that members of the ICOC who hail from California research institutions face a conflict of interest in allocating the funds.

Court of Appeals on Monday rejected those arguments and upheld Proposition 71’s constitutionality by a 3-0 vote.

“It’s a great court victory for Californians and a great court victory of medical research in this country in the fight between medical research and ideology,” said Robert Klein, the chairman of the ICOC, in a conference call Tuesday morning.

It is expected that the California Family Bioethics Council will appeal the ruling to the California Supreme Court within the 40-day statutory limit. The Supreme Court will then have 90 days to decide whether to try the case.