Industry Partnerships

Innovation benefits people's lives only when discoveries move from the university to the marketplace as products and ser­vices. QB3 helps to meet society’s needs by establishing mutually beneficial partnerships between our research scientists and private industry.

We have formed excellent collaborations with Pfizer, GE Healthcare, BP, and Nikon Instruments, among others. We play an integral role in recruiting life science industries to California.

• Amyris Biotechnologies and OneWorld Health
  

  

  Research led by QB3-Berkeley’s Jay Keasling resulted in the invention of a benchtop process for making artemisinin, a potent antimalarial drug. This work is the most ambitious application of synthetic pathway engineering to date. A new collaboration to scale up production combines the efforts of Keasling's lab; Amyris Biotechnologies (founded in part by Keasling); and the non-profit drug company Institute for OneWorld Health. The ultimate payoff of this three-way partnership will be an affordable, accessible treatment for malaria, a disease that kills between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Pfizer-UCSF Partnership

  

  The Pfizer-UCSF partnership, formed in June 2008, exemplifies how QB3 fosters cata­lytic partnerships between the University of California and private industry. Spanning many disciplines, several UC campuses and multiple Pfizer research units, the three-year agreement establishes a collaboration to speed the translation of basic research discoveries into diagnostics, drugs and other treatments with support from Pfizer up to $9.5 million. Catherine Mackey, senior vice president of Pfizer Global Research and Development, leads the collaboration for the company; Tracy Saxton, Ph.D., QB3's Director of Industry Alliances, manages the collaboration at QB3.

• SynBERC Industry Consortium

  

  QB3 was instrumental in creating the NSF-funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC)—a consortium, funded with more than $4 million in government and industry support, that includes representatives of the high-tech, biotech, and pharmaceutical industries. SynBERC partners include UCB, UCSF, Harvard, MIT, and Prairie View A&M University.

• The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI)
  

  

  EBI is a public/private partnership designed to find solutions to two of the greatest challenges facing the world today: how to produce energy from new sources and how to reduce the environmental impact of energy production. Born from a QB3-driven collaboration between UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois, the part­nership is leading the way to form an alternative energy industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Funded by a $500 million 10-year grant from the global energy conglomerate BP, EBI is the largest public-private partnership at any U.S. university.

• GE Healthcare
  

  

  In the original association with GE Healthcare, UCSF physicians and GE researchers evaluated how best to apply magnetic resonance imaging technology to patient care at the UCSF Department of Radiology. The relationship has since expanded and resulted in the formation of the Surbeck Laboratory for Advanced Imaging at Byers Hall. The goals of this laboratory are to increase the sensitivity and specificity of in vivo MR and to develop anatomic, functional, and metabolic imaging techniques for applications in biology and medicine. The Surbeck Laboratory links imaging specialists, bioengineers, and clinicians from academia with collaborators from GE Healthcare. Additionally, it gives students from UCSF and UC Berkeley the oppor­tunity to obtain hands-on experience in obtaining and analyzing high-field MR imaging and spectroscopic data.

• UCSF Nikon Imaging Center

  

  The UCSF Nikon Imaging Center at QB3/UCSF  is a joint QB3/UCSF School of Medicine facility for light microscopy developed in partnership with Nikon Instruments Inc. and Technical Instruments. Opened in 2006, the facility is equipped with six microscopes, peripherals, and six imaging processing stations, providing investigators access to cutting-edge microscopy resources. There are ten company partners in the center and the value of the donated equipment is approximately $2.3 million.

• UCSF Viral Diagnostics and Discovery Center

  The UCSF VDDC is a new core facility arising from a multi-year collaborative agreement between UCSF and Abbott Diagnostics. Novel detection technologies employed at the center (the Virochip microarray and deep sequencing) are derived from the pioneering research of Don Ganem and Joseph DeRisi. The center focuses on detection and discovery of novel viruses associated with acute and chronic human illnesses. It is open to collaborations with academic institutions, laboratories, and hospitals on viral pathogen discovery projects. These projects will help find the viral causes of unexplained acute illnesses (respiratory infections, gastroenteritis, encephalitis), as well as chronic illnesses such as cancer.