Catalyst Program Newsletter

Newsletter

Winter 2023

Congratulations to the 2023 Kunal Patel Catalyst Awardees!

Catalyst Awards are the centerpiece of the Catalyst Program. UCSF principal investigators with promising early-stage research projects designed for patient benefit and with commercial potential spanning therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, digital health, and biotools can apply. Awarded projects receive mentorship and advice from the Catalyst Industry Advisor network as well as seed funding. The most recent Catalyst Award cycle was very competitive and the Catalyst Advisor Selection Committee selected the following 15 projects as the 2023 Catalyst Awardees:

Reza Abbasi-Asl, PhD and Simon Little, PhD - Interpretable Machine Learning for Video-Assisted Diagnosis and Tracking of Parkinson’s Disease

Matthew Amans, MD - A Device for Diagnosis of Pulsatile Tinnitus

Jeannie Bailey, PhD and Ryan Halvorson, MD - A Mobile Application for Digitally Tracking and forecasting Patient-Centric Response to Musculoskeletal Treatment

Mauro Caffarelli, MD and Edilberto Amorimm, MD - Electrofunctional Imaging for Real-Time Detection of Large Vessel Ischemic Stroke Using Electroencephalography

Claire Clelland, MD, PhD - CRISPR Gene Therapy for Neurodegenerative Disease: Target Gene Correction for ALS

Steve Francis, PhD, MS - An Extracellular Vesicle Based Approach for Identifying High Risk Pancreatic Cyst Lesions

Maria Garcia, MD, MAS, MPH, Lisa Ochoa-Frongia, MD, Valy Fontil, MD, MAS, and Mark Pletcher, MD, MPH - Optimizing Depression Care Delivery in Primary Care Through a Technology-Enhanced Intervention (Optimize-D-Rx)

Ezequiel Goldschmidt, MD, PhD, Ronald Fearing, PhD, SB, SM, and Ishan Kanungo - Soft Locomotive Robot Driven by Multiple Independent Pouch Motors to Perform Minimally Invasive Paranasal Sinus Biopsies

Brian Haas, MD - NeedleGPS: the Guided Positioning System for Needle Insertions

Alexander Haddad, MD, Manish Aghi, MD, PhD, MAS, and Noriyuki Kasahara, MD, PhD - A Synthetic Replicating Retroviral Platform for Glioblastoma Viral Immunotherapy

Lohith Kini, MD, PhD, Ankit Khambhati, PhD, and Peter Hadar, MD, MSTR - AIMSS: the AI-Based Mobile Stroke Scale

Alexander Lin, MD, MBA, FACS - Improving Health Equity of Children with Cleft Palate - Artificial Intelligence to Improve Early Detection of Surgical Speech Problems

Dengke Ma, PhD and Dean Sheppard, MD - Targeting TMEM-131 as a Novel Approach to Treating Pulmonary Fibrosis

Minnie Sarwal, MD, PhD and Swas Sur, PhD - Novel Renoprotective Drug Target Discovery in an Established Renal Tubular Injury Model

Arun Wiita, MD, PhD - Non-Myeloablative OR-Gated Car-T Cell Therapy for Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Explore the previous Catalyst Awardees and learn more about

the Kunal Patel Innovation Fund

Catalyst Awardees Present to Investors at the “Born in California Investor Demo Days”

Several companies funded by the Catalyst Program and launched out of UCSF, including Alessa Therapeutics, Diatiro, Ooney, and Neomer Diagnostics, joined many of the University of California’s best and most investment-worthy startups seeking Seed and Series A investors, to pitch their business to investors at the Cove at University of California, Irvine.

Learn more

Catalyst Program Startup Tidepool Scores FDA Clearance for Smartphone Application

Aaron Neinstein's and Jenise Wong's Catalyst Project has been honored with several accolades since it received a Catalyst Award in Spring 2012. Most recently, Tidepool has landed a highly-anticipated FDA nod for an artificial pancreas app connecting continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps.

Learn more

Two Catalyst Awardees Elected into the National Academy of Medicine

Congratulations to Ida Sim, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine and Computational Precision Health, and UCSF director of the UCSF UC Berkeley Joint Program in Computational Precision Health, as well as Tippi MacKenzie, MD, Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology, and director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research on their election into the National Academy of Medicine!

Professor Sim was a 2021 Catalyst Awardee for her project titled "Patient-Generated Data (PGD) Cloud: A Public Digital Utility for Patient-Generated Data as a Service" and Professor MacKenzie was a 2015 Catalyst Awardee for her project titled "In Utero Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation for Alpha Thalassemia Major."

This is one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Congratulations to Professor Sim, Professor Mackenzie, and all other newly elected members!

Learn more

Catalyst Digital Health Advisor Sharat Israni Selected as an NIH Data Scholar

Congratulations to Catalyst Program Digital Health Advisor Sharat Israni on his selection as an NIH Data Scholar. Sharat will be working on “relevance,” a core area applicable to both clinical and research data science/AI. He will remain CTO of BCHSI and advisor to the Catalyst Program.

Safe Access Grows Revenue Beyond $1 M

Safe Access, which started as an idea during the UCSF Covid-19 hackathon has early revenues over $1 M. Safe Access operates as a health & safety solution concierge and offers a complete solution package for companies to manage the health risk for all their employees with their easy to use, private, secure, and flexible platform.

Learn more

Catalyst Awardees Publish Exciting Studies

Several-time Catalyst Awardee Chaz Langelier, MD, PhD, recently had a paper published in Nature focused around his 2020 Catalyst Project titled "Integrated Host/Microbe Metagenomics (iHMM) for Precision Diagnosis of Sepsis." Learn more

Matt Jacobson, PhD, another serial Catalyst Awardee also published a paper in the International Journal of Parasitology around his 2020 Catalyst Project titled "Development of Small Molecule Drug for the Treatment of Chloroquine-Resistant Malaria." Learn more

Catalyst Awardee Hani Goodarzi Wins NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research Grant

Hani Goodarzi, PhD, principal investigator for the 2018 Catalyst Project titled "Developing the Next Generation of Liquid Biopsies" which was the basis for the startup company Exai Bio that recently launched with $65 M in Series A financing, was named one of the winners of the National Institutes of Health High-Risk, High-Reward (HRHR) Research Grant. The HRHR program supports research that is "transformative, catalytic, synergistic, cross-cutting, and has unique potential in areas of behavioral and biomedical research.

Learn more

Congratulations Jeni Janci and Catalyst Program Startup CaptureDx

Catalyst Program and LaunchPad Program Director Jeni Janci, PhD, is now committing herself full-time to serving as Co-founder and CEO of CaptureDx. CaptureDx started as a Catalyst Award in 2019 led by Aaron Kornblith, MD, with the goal of increasing safe, fast, and accurate emergency diagnoses through the use of AI-guided ultrasound exams. The Catalyst Program wishes Jeni and CaptureDx the best of luck as the company moves along the translational pathway towards commercialization and patient benefit.

Welcome Sohela Shah

Sohela earned her PhD in Genetics from Tufts University, School of Biomedical Sciences in Boston and did postdoctoral training in rare disease genetics at University of California, San Francisco. After her postdoc, she joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as a Niehaus Scholar to continue her research in clinical genetics and genomics. Additionally, she led the development of NGS data interpretation and reporting software for genetic test results at Ingenuity Systems (acquired by QIAGEN) and Invitae Corp. Sohela will work closely with Roopa Ramamoorthi, PhD, PMP, on the InVent Fund and Catalyst Program.

Signup for Catalyst Program Newsletters