Over the course of three weeks, roughly 400 participants and mentors from around the world – including from many of the world’s top education, research, and technology institutions – have teamed up as a result of the UCSF COVID-19 Hackathon hosted by the UCSF LaunchPad and UCSF Catalyst Program to design new innovative and technical solutions to the health, medical, and scientific challenges we face due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Projects have ranged from innovative mental health applications, fascinating telehealth models, pioneering medical devices and PPE, state-of-the-art epidemiology and public health solutions, as well as cutting edge therapeutics and diagnostics. All these innovative and elegant solutions have made great strides since their initial video submissions and all the hard work, creativity, and collaboration is both inspiring and making a real difference in the fight against the novel coronavirus.
Hackathon Awardees
- One-year sponsored lab bench at MBC BioLabs
- One-year sponsored access to our core facility equipped with >$2 million worth of research instruments
- Access to the shared amenities and services provided at MBC BioLabs
- $5K in free corporate legal work and $5K in free patent legal work (a total of $10K for each of the following winners): BREATH, bunnyPAPR, Nevap, RonaBot, SPARA, and uPlasma
- $3K in free corporate legal work and $3K in free patent legal work (a total of $6K for each of the following winners): Calm On, Contain Covid, Covid Pass, Epiwe, Reusable Anti-Viral Respirator Filters, and Wing Health
- Additionally, Wilson Sonsini is providing a free corporate or patent consultation to any of the participant teams.
Mentorship and pitch sessions:
- $5,000 in AWS Credits valid for 2 years
- 1 year of AWS Business Support (up to $1,500)
- 80 credits for Self-Paced Labs
Thank you to all of our sponsors for you generous support!
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Catalyst Awards are the centerpiece of the Catalyst Program. UCSF principal investigators with promising early-stage research projects designed for patient benefit and with commercial potential spanning therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, digital health, and biotools can apply. Awarded projects receive mentorship and advice from our pool of expert industry advisors as well as seed funding. The most recent Catalyst Award cycle was very competitive with over 80 project applications and 25 finalists selected to present their projects to the Catalyst Industry Advisor Award Committee that
selected the following 16 projects as the 2020 Catalyst Awardees:
- Diane Barber, PhD Screening Methodology and Therapeutic Discovery Targeting Dysregulated Lysosomes in Cancer and Neurodegenerative Disorders
- John Burke, MD, Prasad Shirvalkar, MD, PhD and Doris Wang, MD, PhD Discovering the Biomarkers of Lower Limb Movement and Locomotion Through Human Spinal Cord Recording
- Jennifer Chen, MD, Bill DeGrado, PhD, and John Gordan, MD, PhD Targeting the Ceramide Pathway for the Treatment of NASH and Hepatocellular Carcinoma
- Pamela England, PhD and Matt Jacobson, PhD Small Molecule Therapeutics Targeting Nurr1 for the Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease
- Valy Fontil, MD, MAS, MPH Engage-Rx: Harnessing Cloud-Based Technology for Comprehensive Management of Hypertension through Patient Engagement and Clinical Decision Support
- Ying Han, MD, PhD A Gel-Based System for Long-Term Release of Ocular Medication
- Matt Jacobson, PhD Development of Small Molecule Drug for the Treatment of Chloroquine-Resistant Malaria
- Chaz Langelier, MD, PhD Integrated Host/Microbe Metagenomics (iHMM) for Precision Diagnosis of Sepsis
- Leqian Liu, PhD and Adam Abate, PhD Fast and Reproducible Synthesis of Multicellular Tumor Organoids
- John Metcalfe, MD, PhD, MPH Handheld DNA Sequencing for Rapid Detection of New and Repurposed Drug Resistance in M. tuberculosis
- Gopika Nair, PhD Identification of Novel Regulators of Human Pancreatic Beta Cell Mass Using Stem Cell-Based HTS Platform
- Nicole Paulk, PhD,Joseph DeRisi, PhD, and David Raleigh MD, PhD A Novel Platform Approach to Immunotherapy via Non-Oncolytic Viral Gene Therapy for Glioblastoma
- Shuvo Roy, PhD An Implantable Device for Fluid Removal for Heart Failure Patients
- James Rubenstein, MD, PhD Antibodies Targeting Novel Innate Immunity Mechanisms as Cancer Therapeutic
- Matthew Stachler, MD, PhD Risk Stratification Biomarkers of Patients with Low-Grade Dysplastic Barrett's Esophagus
- Doris Wang, MD, PhD Decoding the Neural Signatures of Gait in Parkinson's Disease
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The Catalyst Awardees are currently working on their Target Product Profiles (“TPP”) to help advance the awarded projects along the translational pathway and this summer recruited 65 interns from UCSF, UC Berkeley, UC Hastings, Stanford, and San Francisco State University to help the 2020 Catalyst Awardee Project Teams create the TPP. In June, the Catalyst Program facilitated a workshop with the program's expert industry advisors for the Catalyst Awardee Project Teams and Catalyst Interns focused on the development of a TPP. The workshop topics included the role of the TPP in translational studies, Project Management, Intellectual Property, as well as the importance of the TPP for product development and commercialization. Project Teams will develop and present their TPP this Fall to expert industry advisors for additional feedback.
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Erica Pascal, PhD, JD (left) presented on Intellectual Property and Ken Fang, MD (right) presented on the importance of the TPP for product development and commercialization during the TPP Workshop.
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Highlighted Efforts from Members of the Catalyst Program Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Aenor Sawyer, MD
, Chief Health Innovation Officer at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health,
Director of the UCSF Skeletal Health Service, and catalyzed the Digital Health Track of the Catalyst Program, innovatively engineered a way to refurbish thousands of expired N95 masks.
Learn more.
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UCSF professor of Laboratory Medicine and Catalyst Program Awardee
Charles Chiu, MD, PhD and his lab are sequencing COVID-19 virus genomes to track mutations and understand the spread of the infection.
Learn more
.
Additionally, Dr. Chiu's
new CRISPR technologies are critical to the next generation of COVID-19 testing that could give results in about 45 minutes.
Learn more.
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Congratulations to previous Catalyst Awardee
Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD
, on the US FDA approval of the first video game therapeutic as a treatment for ADHD in children based on his research.
Learn more
.
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Digital Health Awards Again to Honor Digital Healthcare
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UCSF Innovation Ventures and Health Hub have announced the second annual
UCSF Digital Health Awards
. These awards will honor outstanding new digital technologies that not only dramatically improve healthcare but do so by means that reduce costs and improve access to medical innovations. This year the award show will be live-streamed to ensure our participants good health.
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Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved.
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