November Newsletter

November News

Dear Colleagues

With so many on-going projects and our focus constantly on the future, we sometimes lose track of the successes that brought us to where we are right now. It is for this reason that Innovation Ventures is pleased to launch our inaugural newsletter, which gives us the opportunity to remind you what our role is in supporting innovation and entrepreneurship within UCSF while recognizing some recent accomplishments and additions to our capabilities.

Technology development and commercialization is a complex process and every project is unique. Innovation Ventures is dedicated to helping our faculty and students, in all of our schools, navigate those complexities. To that end, our staff will work closely with you on the complete spectrum of activities required to develop a product from filing an invention disclosure to seeking a development partner to starting your own company. And in order to provide translational support to those projects most likely to benefit patients, not only does the Catalyst Program provide competitive grants, but Innovation Ventures is happy to announce that we have just received our first significant gift from the venture capitalist, philanthropist and friend of UCSF, Brook Byers, to seed the Innovation Fund. This gift is the first of what we hope will be many and will enable us to begin to prosecute select UCSF projects further through translation, thereby maintaining more control and building greater value before licensing them to an established company or new UCSF start-up. By giving them a longer gestation period, we are ensuring these great ideas will get to the marketplace more fully developed and with greater confidence, thereby increasing their chances of success. An enhanced Catalyst Program, led by Charles Hart, will form the basis of identifying and selecting projects for additional IV funding.

As we approach the end of the year, we are excited by the number and scale of new and expanding partnerships that are currently under negotiation and look forward to finalizing and announcing those in the coming months. In the meantime, we will continue to improve how we serve the needs of our colleagues within UCSF as well as our partners without. The addition of Charles Hart, PhD, as the head of Catalyst and Michael Lesh, MD, as the Executive Director for Health Technology Innovation, has added significant expertise to the team in the areas of program leadership, drug discovery, medical device, diagnostics and digital health innovation and commercialization.

As we move into our Fall Semester here at UCSF, we direct your attention to some of the events of the past year.

Thank you,

Barry Selick, PhD.

Vice Chancellor,

Business Development, Innovation and Partnerships

Innovation Ventures Start Up

Treating Cognitive Disfunction

With Video Games

Digital medicine technology pioneer Akili Interactive and the University of California, San Francisco received the issuance of multiple patents that cover the first non-drug, digital treatment designed to specifically target networks in the brain using video games.

Watch Our Video

Innovation Ventures Goes Public

UCSF Start-Up Revealed

In Generous Nasdaq IPO

Founded by Jack Taunton's laboratory at UCSF in 2012, Principia Biopharma began trading in September at a generous $17.00 per share for its initial public offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq, raising approximately $122.2 million.

Community Benefit

User-Friendly Online Tools Help

Navigate Medical Care

A user-friendly website on advance care planning, PrepareForYourCare.org, as well as easy-to-read advance directives, can be highly effective in empowering both English- and Spanish-speaking older adults to plan for their future medical care, according to a study by the research team led by Rebecca Sudore, MD. at UC San Francisco.

Medical Technology

FDA Clears FOR46 For Clinical Trials

Originated in the UCSF laboratory of Bin Liu, Ph.D. and developed with Fortis Therapeutics, the FDA has cleared two investigational new drug applications to begin clinical trials for novel anti-CD46 (FOR46) to treat late-stage prostate cancer and multiple myeloma

Community Wealth

Health Hub Launches in

Collaboration with UCSF

UC San Francisco and newly formed, next-generation nonprofit Health Hub, have announced plans to affiliate so they bring UCSF inventors and local entrepreneurs support and professional development to build successful companies.

Innovation Partners

Arkin and Taunton Receive Awards

Michelle Arkin, PhD, for her study in stabilizing protein-protein interactions that could lead to new cancer treatments, and Jack Taunton, PhD, for his work in chemo-proteomic technologies, respectively received the 2018 Breakthrough Science Initiative Award from the Ono Pharma Foundation

ATOM Progresses In Research Reduction

Public-private consortium, Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) uses pharma data and supercomputers to predict drug safety, pharmacology, and efficacy to drastically reduce the time it takes to go from target selection to an Investigational New Drug (IND).

ATOM's Website

FDA Approvals

Radio Frequency

Sedative Gets

FDA Nod

FDA grants 510(K) clearance to UCSF start up leading to Its first procedures and $58 Million in equity funding for Intracept Procedure .

Let There Be Light... Adjustable Lens

RxSight's light adjustable lens, first IOL to enable refractive correction after cataract surgery, gets FDA approval.

More Innovation (ad)Ventures

$62 Million Boost

Helps Pionyr

Fight Cancer

New Enterprise Associates leads Series B investment and raises Pionyr war chest to $72 million to help Antibody-Based t arget a Tumor's Microenvironment.

Patent to Purchase:

$567 Million

BioTech Titan Gilead Sciences purchased Wendell Lim's cancer fighting technology company Cell Design Labs Inc. with a little help from Innovation Ventures.