March Newsletter

March News 2019

New Beginnings

Big Welcome to OTM Executive Director

Anthony Francis

Innovation Ventures celebrates the new year by welcoming Anthony Francis to lead our Office of Technology Management(OTM). Anthony joins us after an extensive career in Australia, most recently as the managing director of GP Partners, a group investing in primary care innovations made through their own accelerator team. Before that, Francis established Flinders Partners at Flinders University where he became managing director of that organization and led it to establish 12 spin off companies, with numerous licenses and many commercial partnerships. He also founded TCG, a specialist technology commercialization company that was acquired by Deloitte.

Anthony has spent the last 25 years deeply engaged with researchers, commercial partners and investors, often creating new ways to achieve success. Because it is often administrative issues that slow innovation and frustrate inventors and partners alike, Anthony excels at cutting through “red tape” and confusion about business models by intervening personally to find solutions that benefit all stakeholders.

“In the coming year Innovation Ventures will be even more proactive,” Anthony Francis says. “The best way to bridge our researchers to their potential markets is to partner even more closely with both our UCSF peers and our external collaborators. We need to make it as easy as possible to access UCSF innovations.”

Being a trusted partner to our investigators is the key objective of UCSF Innovation Ventures. With Anthony’s leadership we believe that our faculty will discover more opportunities for growth, as their research extends to its full potential. He is a boon to our team, bringing with him a wealth of industry knowledge, experience, and relationships. We trust him to guide our technology management forward as we continue to develop healthcare science and bring these discoveries to the people who need them most.

“It is a privilege to work among such great science and healthcare professionals,” Anthony says. “We hope to build even stronger partnerships with our UCSF researchers and bring the best innovation to the benefit of all.”

We wish you the best of luck Anthony!

NIH Research Funding

UCSF Is Top Public Recipient

of NIH Funds... 12 Years Running

UC San Francisco was the top public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2018, the12th year in a row that UCSF claimed the top spot among public institutions, and the eighth straight year in which the University ranked second overall among institutions nationwide.

Catalyst Fund

CRISPR-mediated Activation to

Reduce Obesity

Catalyst awardees, Nadav Ahituv, PhD and Navneet Matharu, PhD, apply CRISPR-mediated activation to reduce obesity with historic results, have had their exciting findings published in Science Journal.

‘Undruggable’ Molecule

Spills Its Secrets

Researchers led by Pamela England, PhD. have for the first time developed a strategy for targeting Nurr1, a key molecule implicated in Parkinson’s disease, and published their groundbreaking findings in Cell Chemical Biology .

Innovation Startups

Mission Bio Raises $30M To

Expand Tapestri’s Reach

Mission Bio raises $30M in series B funding with technology originating from the laboratory of UCSF researcher Adam Abate, to scale the first-ever platform aimed at predicting and preventing cancer relapse with single-cell genomics.

Sana Biotechnology Launched With

UCSF Founder

UCSF’s Sonja Schrepfer helps found startup Sana Biotechnology, led by

former Juno executives, with a focus on engineering cells

to create a new class of medicines.

Researcher of the Month

An Interview With A

Pharmaceutical Chemist

UCSF chemistry professor – and Three-time Catalyst awardee

Charles Craik shares his knowledge about patents and the research

findings that drive them .

Innovation Ventures Awardee

Tejal Desai Named Director of

UCSF HIVE

Health Innovation Via Engineering, a new initiative at UC San Francisco,

will bring together engineers to tackle some of the most urgent challenges in healthcare – f rom nanoscale sensors that monitor biological changes in the body to engineered tissues for organ replacement.

Strategic Alliance Opportunities

UCSF Investigators:

Sanofi iAwards RFP Call

Coming This Spring

The Sanofi iAwards is a one-year funding opportunity that allows PIs to use the resources of Sanofi to test early stage molecules, antibodies, and gene therapies. Oncology, immunology, rare and neurological diseases are preferred areas of interest. Successful projects can be converted to a larger and more generous award after the first year.

If this is of interest to you, and you want to learn more about how to leverage your application, please email

Yuxi Lin

Entrepreneurship Success

Tidepool to Develop 'Loop' with $6M

UCSF Entrepreneurship Center Alumnus Howard Look, founder of Tidepool receives grant to initiate development of a hybrid closed loop automated insulin delivery as an FDA-regulated mobile application.

Elemeno

Health Named

“Fierce 15”

UCSF Entrepreneurship Center graduate, Elemeno Health was named one of the 2019 Fierce 15 companies by FierceHealthcare , designating it as one of the most promising healthcare companies in the industry.