Two UC startups move into QB3 Garage@UCSF

The QB3 Garage@UCSF is a biotech micro-incubator with space for five to seven companies. Photo: Susan Merrell, UCSF

Two new companies have moved into the QB3 Garage@UCSF, the biotech incubator on the UCSF Mission Bay campus.

The new companies are Refactored Materials, which is developing artificial spider silk, and SeaChange Pharmaceuticals, which is searching for new therapeutic applications for FDA-approved drugs. The Garage, which has space for five to seven companies depending on size, is fully occupied.

“Spider silk fibers have toughness that exceeds that of the best manmade synthetics by an order of magnitude,” says Dan Widmaier, CEO of Refactored and a recent PhD graduate from the laboratory of UCSF professor and QB3 member Chris Voigt. “We want to reproduce the natural fiber.” Widmaier says that Refactored’s process is “green”—spider silk is made at room temperature in water-based solution, unlike Kevlar, which is produced in a toxic high-temperature environment.

“The Garage is good because we can start with just an idea and some grant funding and answer the question, ‘will it work,’ because no-one wants to waste years of their time if it’s going to fail. I want to know in six months,” Widmaier says.

Ethan Mirsky, Refactored’s founder and a graduate student in Voigt’s laboratory, says a Garage address gives Refactored legitimacy they need to win research and small business grants. “Also, you can’t buy some of this equipment and have it shipped to your home address,” Mirsky adds. “We tried.”

Refactored has won two federal Small Business Innovation Research grants. Widmaier, Mirsky, and others won a $25,000 QB3 Catalyst grant to support related research in the laboratory of UC Berkeley bioengineering professor and QB3 member Luke Lee.

The second company moving into the Garage@UCSF, SeaChange, uses a technique called “similarity ensemble approach” (SEA) to find new protein targets for existing drugs. SEA was developed by Michael Keiser during his recently completed PhD with UCSF professor and QB3 member Brian Shoichet. Their work featured in Wired’s top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2009.

SeaChange will focus on what Keiser, Seachange’s president, calls “specialty pharma”—areas not served by large pharmaceutical companies. An initial area of interest is Parkinson’s disease. “It has a good foundation [the Michael J. Fox Foundation], an unmet patient need, and good science—defined therapeutic targets, which are dopamine receptors,” Keiser says.

Before launching SeaChange, Shoichet and Keiser received $225,000 from the Rogers Family Foundation in the form of Rogers Bridging-the-Gap awards, designed to speed the conversion of research into practical benefit to society. The Rogers awards are coordinated by QB3.

“It means a lot to me that the Garage is here at UCSF,” Keiser says. “It would be hard to run something like this out of your apartment. Here, Brian [Shoichet] is just upstairs. I can go to qed talks [QB3’s entrepreneurship seminar] and talk to Douglas [Crawford, associate executive director of QB3].”

“The turnover shows the continuing vitality and entrepreneurship emerging from the QB3 community,” says Crawford. “One of the positive feedback loops for the Garage is that it inspires grad students and postdocs to contemplate entrepreneurship as they complete their training.”