Catalyst Program Newsletter

Newsletter

Winter 2022

Congratulations to the 2022 Kunal Patel Catalyst Awardees!

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 the Catalyst Advisor network as well as seed funding. The most recent Catalyst Award cycle was very competitive and the Catalyst Industry Advisor Selection Committee selected the following 15 projects as the 2022 Catalyst Awardees:

Nadav Ahituv, PhD and Ofer Yizhar-Barnea, PhD Identification of Neoantigens for CAR-T Therapy Using Neomer Discovery

Lauren Asarnow, PhD Improving Sleep Among Adolescents through Digital Health Solutions

Andy Chang, PhD and Alexandra Scharr, PhD Targeting a Non-opioid Signaling Pathway to Reverse Opioid-induced Respiratory Depression

Emily Finlayson, MD, MPH, MS PrehabPal: AI-powered Surgery Preparation for Vulnerable Older Adults

Alexander Haddad, MD, Manish Aghi, MD, PhD, MAS, and Noriyuki Kasahara, MD, PhD Synthetic Novel Replicating Retroviral Gene Therapy Platform for the Treatment of Glioblastoma

Keith Hansen, MD, James Gardner, MD, PhD, and Garett Roll, MD, FACS DIATIRO Kidney Cooling Jacket: A Regelation Device to Address the Organ Shortage and Improve Transplant Longevity

Matthew Jacobson, PhD N-(4-(dimethylamino)but-2-enyl)-7-chloro-quinolin-4-amine (DAQ) for Treating Chloroquine-resistant Malaria

Noriyuki Kasahara, MD, PhD Universal Stem Cell-based Delivery of Tumor-Selective Retroviral Replicating Vectors

Anastasia Keller, PhD and Jeannie Bailey, PhD Application of Transcutaneous Spinal Cord Stimulation for Treatment of Chronic Low Back Pain

Aras Mattis, MD, PhD Therapeutic Targeting of TM6SF2 Fatty Liver Disease

S. John Liu, MD, PhD, Luke Gilbert, PhD, David Raleigh MD, PhD, and William A. Weiss, MD, PhD High-resolution Discovery of Novel Therapeutics for Glioblastoma Using in vivo CRISPR Perturb-seq

Timothy McCalmont, MD, Michael Wang, MD, Avideh Zakhor, PhD, and Neil Neumann, MD, PhD Quantifying Invasive Tumor Volume by Deep Learning to Improve Malignant Melanoma Prognosis

Julie Saba, MD, PhD Adeno-associated Virus-mediated SGPL1 Gene Therapy

Julie Schallhorn, MD, MS and Nailyn Rasool, MD Transcutaneous Electrical Stimulation for Sustained Eyelid Closure

Jeffrey Sharon, MD Development and Validation of a Machine Learning Based Smartphone Application for Point of Care Vestibular Testing

Explore the full list of Catalyst Awardees and learn more about

the Kunal Patel Innovation Fund

"Rare Disease Discovery: Innovations in Diagnostics and Therapeutics" Symposium on Wednesday, April 20, 2022

The UCSF Catalyst Program and Foundation Ipsen are hosting a rare disease virtual symposium on Wednesday, April 20, 2020, titled "Rare Disease Discovery: Innovations in Diagnostics and Therapeutics." Stay tuned for Rare Disease Day 2022 on February 28 when the full symposium schedule will be released.

Learn more and register today

Startup Based on Catalyst Project Secures $67.5 Million Series A Financing

Exai Bio, based on the technology from a 2018 Catalyst Project led by Hani Goodarzi, PhD, has secured $67.5 million in Series A financing to advance next-generation, RNA-based liquid biopsy platform for early cancer detection.

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Akili Interactive Announces Plans to Become Publicly Traded

Alkili Interactive, based on research by Catalyst Awardee Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, has recently announced plans to become publically traded. Alkili Interactive's flagship product is EndeavorRX, the first-ever video game therapeutic as an approved treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children.

Learn more

Catalyst Awardee Julie Saba is Awarded Follow-on Funding from CIRM

The California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) recently awarded Jule Saba, MD, PhD, a grant of $1,463,400 for her project "Providing a cure for sphingosine phosphate lyase insufficiency syndrome (SPLIS) through adeno-associated viral-mediated SGPL1 gene therapy" for preclinical development of gene therapy for this rare genetic disorder.

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Catalyst Industry Advisor Ellen Berg Joins Insitro as VP of Biomarker Sciences

Ellen Berg, PhD, is a scientific leader in translational human biology for drug discovery with distinguished knowledge and experience developing and commercializing new technologies for translational research. Prior to joining insitro, Ellen served as Chief Scientific Officer of translational biology for Eurofins Discovery where she developed new scientific directions for the company’s in vitro pharmacology and phenotypic profiling data and analysis services.

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Catalyst Award Project Publication

Catalyst Awardees Aaron Kornblith, MD, Rima Arnaout, MD, and Rachel Callcut, MD, MSPH, recently published their findings based on their Catalyst Project in the Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine as a paper titled "Development and Validation of a Deep Learning Strategy for Automated View Classification of Pediatric Focused Assessment With Sonography for Trauma." Dr. Kornblith and his team are continuing to develop their technology and are a current Finalist for the 2022 UCSF-Stanford Pediatric Device Consortium Accelerator.

Read the publication

iHackHealth Appathon 2.0

Winners Announced

Congratulations to all on their extraordinary participation during the second iteration of the iHackHealth Appathon! From the UCSF practitioners who proposed mobile app ideas to improve research, clinical practice, and patient care to the UC Berkeley students who developed these mobile app ideas into iOS prototypes - all did an amazing job! Below are this year's awardees:

First Prize - DermScan, David Wu, MD/PhD Candidate
Second Prize - Bellweather, Stefano Leitner, MD, MPH, Occupational & Environmental Medicine Resident
Third Prize - AIMSS, Lohith Kini, MD, PhD, Radiology Resident

Watch the Final Event

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