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UC Berkeley — once the center of a debate around corporate funding of academic research — wants to make one thing clear at this week's 42nd annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference: It wants to be your partner.
It's a significant step for the University of California, Berkeley, which historically hasn't taken such prominent steps to highlight the entrepreneurial energy flowing out of its campus. But the confluence of 20,000 life sciences executives, entrepreneurs, bankers and venture capitalists in San Francisco during "JPM Week" — biotech's biggest conference, starting today — is too big an opportunity for the university to miss showing off innovative young companies and get their inventions into established drugmakers' hands and, ultimately, to patients.
Two events in particular spotlight UC Berkeley's mindset: The on-campus Bakar Labs incubator and law firm Wilson Sonsini are sponsoring a reception Monday night at the foot of Market Street, and the university's Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center has organized a Tuesday event in a temporarily converted South of Market art gallery to showcase 24 biotech drug, medical device, diagnostics and research tools startups.
The events represent a sea change led by Rich Lyons, the former dean of UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and now chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, and Dave Schaffer, the director of the UC system's QB3 program, UC's Bakar Labs incubator and the labs' home, Bakar BioEnginuity Hub.
The startups featured Tuesday are sourced from the Berkeley SkyDeck and Bakar Labs incubators as well as the Bakar Fellows program and the Innovative Genomics Institute, which last year launched the HS Chau Women in Enterprising Science program to serve as a proving ground for young ventures.
"We could have sourced 100. There was so much interest," said Darren Cooke, executive director of the Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center.
The idea of getting in front of potential partners or funders isn't new for the 10-campus UC system during JPM Week — including the J.P. Morgan event, ancillary conferences, hundreds of networking gatherings and thousands of one-on-one meetings near Union Square — isn't new. UC Davis, for example, has had a JPM Week event for years.
UC Berkeley has traditionally stayed away from the fray, despite its long reputation as a hotbed of innovation: PitchBook last fall named the university the top public university with undergraduate alumni founding venture-backed startups.
For the startup event around the J.P. Morgan conference, Cooke said, Berkeley leaders want to highlight a range of young companies, from startups to those ready to launch products.
But there's history to highlight, too. Berkeley spinouts have capitalized on the CRISPR genome-editing technology pioneered by Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, for example, the clean-energy work of chemical engineering professor Jay Keasling, foundational cancer immunotherapy research by immunologist Jim Allison and the chemical and biological engineering work directed Schaffer.
"Those are major successes," Cooke said, "and other faculty see that and say, 'How do I be like Dave Schaffer?'"
Under Lyons, UC Berkeley has stitched together resources for budding bio-entrepreneurs and others who may not realize they can spin out their work, Cooke said. Many of those programs have existed for years, but there wasn't a one-stop shop for finding them.
"I graduated 20 years ago in an atmosphere that was less welcoming to entrepreneurs," said Kaspar Mossman, managing director of QB3, a UC hub for early-stage life sciences entrepreneurs.
UC Berkeley's fight with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard around key patents for the DNA-cutting CRISPR technology catalyzed the university's push to provide more support for spinning academic research into commercial hands, Mossman said.
Meanwhile, the support network continues to grow. For example, Risa Stack, Widya Mulyasasmita and Rowan Chapman are putting together venture capital firm BEVC Management LLC with a eye toward backing UC Berkeley spinouts, and Cal is hoping to build out a two-building, 486,000-square-foot "innovation zone" research development in downtown Berkeley.
One of those buildings would be leased to a private developer and house the Innovative Genomics Institute, headed by Jennifer Doudna, a winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize winner for her pioneering work on CRISPR.
"There is a lot that's happening," Cooke said.
The IGI currently is housed in the building that oil giant BP plc funded as part of a planned $500 million investment in biofuels research at Berkeley. That 2007 deal set off an outcry from some academics and students about the potential loss of academic-directed research with Big Business funding, but university officials say a post-hoc analysis of the deal showed it didn't bias researchers and that more than 300 students got experience in green-tech and other high-tech fields.
Even if the only outcome of UC Berkeley's events around JPM Week is raising awareness among potential partners about the university's newly focused startup network, that's OK with QB3's Mossman.
"It never hurts to have more quality investors interested. It never hurts to have entrepreneurs interested. It never hurts to have more people in health care interested," Mossman said. "People realize Berkeley is churning out companies that could solve some (of the world's) problems. Brand awareness is the biggest thing."
