California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences
Encyclopedia
The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute spanning three University of California campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area: UC Berkeley, UCSF, and UC Santa Cruz. QB3's domain is the quantitative biosciences: areas of biology in which advances are chiefly made by scientists applying techniques from physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.
; at UC Santa Cruz, David Haussler
.
, Elizabeth Blackburn
, Steven Chu
, Joseph DeRisi
, David Haussler
, Jay Keasling
, Arun Majumdar
, and Harry Noller.
To aid entrepreneurial scientists, QB3 employs the Innovation Toolkit, a package of services consisting of mentoring, incubator space, pre-commercial funding, and seed-stage venture funding.
QB3 also, through its industry alliance with Pfizer, supports basic and applied research in selected regions of pharmaceutical chemistry.
The QB3 Garage@UCSF was founded in September 2006 in Byers Hall on the UCSF Mission Bay campus, and the QB3 Garage@Berkeley was launched in April 2010 in Stanley Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The Garages offer laboratory space to spinoff companies affiliated with the University of California. Garage tenants pay market rates for increments as small as 120 square feet (11.1 m²) and have the opportunity to use QB3 core scientific facilities (but pay standard rates). There is a time limit of two years for occupancy. Currently the QB3 Garage@UCSF hosts five companies and the QB3 Garage@Berkeley hosts six.
The Garage is named in homage to the Bay Area garages in which both Hewlett-Packard and Apple had their beginnings.
Twenty-six companies rent space near the UCSF Mission Bay campus in the FibroGen building, in the QB3 Mission Bay Innovation Center.
In April 2011, QB3 and Wareham Development, a real estate company, announced that a 9300 square feet (864 m²) space in west Berkeley would house the QB3 East Bay Incubator, to officially launch in June 2011.
QB3 operates the annual Global Bio-Entrepreneurship course (GloBE), a week-long program to teach entrepreneurs how to launch biotechnology companies using the Lean Startup
model.
QB3 also works with GE Healthcare
to offer a course in purification of biological reagents (such as DNA and protein) twice a year.
Marc Shuman, MD, QB3's clinical director, coordinates the "Anti-Medical School" (AMS) bioengineering course offered alternately at UCSF and UC Berkeley. The AMS is related to the Clinical Associates in that practicing clinicians present clinical challenges and work with students to identify technical solutions that might be found in the bioengineering laboratory.
QB3 administrates the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), which sends a team to the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM
) competition.
At QB3-Berkeley, staff coordinate undergraduate summer internships with biotech companies in the Bay Area.
QB3 is affiliated with the graduate program in computational and genomic biology at UC Berkeley.
At UCSF, QB3 is located at Byers Hall on the Mission Bay campus. Byers Hall, officially opened in 2005, also currently hosts the QB3 director's office and QB3 central administration. Many faculty labs are in Genentech Hall, an adjoining building.
At UC Santa Cruz, QB3 forms part of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, and occupies space in the Physical Sciences Building and Engineering 2.
In July 2011, QB3 announced that it was reorganizing internally to concentrate entrepreneurial activities and industry partnerships into a division called the InnoLab, and that the campus sites would focus on academic research.
History
QB3 was founded in 2000 as one of four Governor Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation (originally, California Institutes for Science and Innovation, or "Cal ISIs"). From a 2005 article written for the University of California Systemwide Senate:
The Institutes were launched in 2000 as an ambitious statewide initiative to support research in fields that were recognized as critical to the economic growth of the state—biomedicine, bioengineering, nanosystems, telecommunications and information technology. Moreover, the Cal ISIs were conceived as a catalytic partnership between university research interests and private industry that could expand the state economy into new industries and markets and “speed the movement of innovation from the laboratory into peoples' daily lives” (Governor’s Budget summary 2001-02). The four research centers operate as a partnership among the University, state government, and industry, and each involves structured collaborations among campuses, disciplines, academics researchers, research professional, and students.
Leadership
QB3 is directed by Regis Kelly, a neuroscientist formerly executive vice-chancellor at UCSF from 2001 to 2004. Kelly's office is in the central QB3 office suite at the UCSF Mission Bay campus. On each UC campus, QB3 is led by a campus director, who is an active research scientist: at UC Berkeley, Susan Marqusee; at UCSF, Andrej SaliAndrej Šali
Andrej Šali is a computational structural biologist. He joined the faculty of the Rockefeller University in 1995, following his postdoctoral research at Harvard University...
; at UC Santa Cruz, David Haussler
David Haussler
David Haussler is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is also Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz; director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences on...
.
Faculty
Research faculty are the foundation of QB3. QB3 currently has about 220 faculty members: about 90 from UC Berkeley, 75 from UCSF, and 55 from UC Santa Cruz. The research interests of these faculty fall under the umbrella of the quantitative biosciences. QB3 scientists tend to be bioengineers, biophysicists, or pharmaceutical or computational biologists. Synthetic biology is strongly represented. Members of QB3 include Shuvo RoyShuvo Roy
Shuvo Roy is a Bangladeshi American scientist and inventor of artificial kidney. -Education:* BS : Graduated Magna Cum Laude, with General Honors for triple majors in Physics, Mathematics , and Computer Science, University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio, 1992.* MS : Electrical Engineering and...
, Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Blackburn
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, AC, FRS is an Australian-born American biological researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the...
, Steven Chu
Steven Chu
Steven Chu is an American physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy. Chu is known for his research at Bell Labs in cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, along with his scientific colleagues Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and...
, Joseph DeRisi
Joseph DeRisi
Joseph DeRisi is an American biochemist, specializing in molecular biology, parasitology, genomics, virology, and computational biology.He received a B.A. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D...
, David Haussler
David Haussler
David Haussler is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He is also Professor of Biomolecular Engineering and Director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz; director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences on...
, Jay Keasling
Jay Keasling
Dr. Jay D. Keasling is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Founding Head of the Synthetic Biology Department in...
, Arun Majumdar
Arun Majumdar
Arun Majumdar is a materials scientist, engineer, and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay graduate who is presently President Barack Obama's nominee for the Under Secretary of Energy...
, and Harry Noller.
Activities
A major function of QB3 is to make connections between scientists in different disciplines and between entrepreneurial scientists and business mentors and venture capitalists. QB3 administers buildings custom-designed to facilitate interaction and core facilities intended to bring together researchers from different fields. QB3 also provides networking services for applied research and technology commercialization.Research
QB3 member scientists choose affiliations with one of nine research themes:- Biological Imaging: visualizing biological systems at all scales: atoms, cells, organs
- Biomaterials & Stem Cells: Development of biomaterials and stem cells for biotechnology and therapeutic applications.
- Biomolecular Structure and Mechanism: structure, function and dynamics of macromolecules
- Cellular Dynamics: biochemical and biophysical analysis of cellular processes; visualizing biological systems at all scales: atoms, cells, organs
- Chemical BiologyChemical biologyChemical biology is a scientific discipline spanning the fields of chemistry and biology that involves the application of chemical techniques and tools, often compounds produced through synthetic chemistry, to the study and manipulation of biological systems. This is a subtle difference from...
: applying the tools of chemistry to biology, aiding in drug discovery and interrogation of biology - Genotype to Phenotype: harvesting the information in genomes and the effect of variation
- Precision Measurement & Control of Biological Systems: developing the ability to mechanically, optically or chemically alter and monitor biology for interrogation and diagnostics.
- Synthetic BiologySynthetic biologySynthetic biology is a new area of biological research that combines science and engineering. It encompasses a variety of different approaches, methodologies, and disciplines with a variety of definitions...
: design, redesign and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems - Theoretical Modeling of Biological Systems: Theoretical and computational analysis of macromolecules, biological systems, and interpretation of experimental data
Innovation Toolkit
QB3 is not a technology transfer office and does not handle patent applications. But it does assist scientists in the University of California system who have made discoveries they would like to convert into products or services.To aid entrepreneurial scientists, QB3 employs the Innovation Toolkit, a package of services consisting of mentoring, incubator space, pre-commercial funding, and seed-stage venture funding.
Mentoring
QB3 facilitates introductions to business mentors and venture capitalists in its network; offers the QED@QB3 seminar series on entrepreneurship; and connects seasoned entrepreneurs to early stage startups via its Entrepreneur in Residence program.Pre-commercial funding
QB3 coordinates the annual Bridging-the-Gap Awards, grants of the order of $150,000 renewable up to two years. From the QB3 website: "The Bridging-the-Gap Award is designed to encourage translational research to speed the delivery of medical and non-medical benefits to society."QB3 also, through its industry alliance with Pfizer, supports basic and applied research in selected regions of pharmaceutical chemistry.
Incubators
QB3 operates two campus incubators that are affiliated with spaces managed by private partners in a system called the QB3 Garage/Innovation Network.The QB3 Garage@UCSF was founded in September 2006 in Byers Hall on the UCSF Mission Bay campus, and the QB3 Garage@Berkeley was launched in April 2010 in Stanley Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The Garages offer laboratory space to spinoff companies affiliated with the University of California. Garage tenants pay market rates for increments as small as 120 square feet (11.1 m²) and have the opportunity to use QB3 core scientific facilities (but pay standard rates). There is a time limit of two years for occupancy. Currently the QB3 Garage@UCSF hosts five companies and the QB3 Garage@Berkeley hosts six.
The Garage is named in homage to the Bay Area garages in which both Hewlett-Packard and Apple had their beginnings.
Twenty-six companies rent space near the UCSF Mission Bay campus in the FibroGen building, in the QB3 Mission Bay Innovation Center.
In April 2011, QB3 and Wareham Development, a real estate company, announced that a 9300 square feet (864 m²) space in west Berkeley would house the QB3 East Bay Incubator, to officially launch in June 2011.
Commercial funding
In 2009, QB3 director Regis Kelly and associate director Douglas Crawford established Mission Bay Capital (MBC), a venture capital fund currently standing at $11.3 million. MBC exists outside the University of California system but is managed pro bono by Kelly and Crawford. MBC's mission is to make seed-stage investments in biotech companies emerging from the University of California and return 20% of profits to QB3. 80% of profits will return to the limited partners: private investors who contributed to the fund. MBC's portfolio currently includes Redwood Bioscience, a company based on "aldehyde tagging" technology developed in the laboratory of UC Berkeley professor Carolyn Bertozzi; and Calithera, a cancer therapeutics startup launched by UCSF professor Jim Wells. (Bertozzi and Wells are members of QB3.)Education
QB3 does not offer accredited courses. It is, however, involved in a number of educational initiatives.QB3 operates the annual Global Bio-Entrepreneurship course (GloBE), a week-long program to teach entrepreneurs how to launch biotechnology companies using the Lean Startup
Lean Startup
"Lean startup" is a term coined by Eric Ries, his method advocates the creation of rapid prototypes designed to test market assumptions, and uses customer feedback to evolve them much faster than via more traditional product development practices, such as the Waterfall model...
model.
QB3 also works with GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare is a division of GE Technology Infrastructure, which is itself a division of General Electric . It employs more than 46,000 people worldwide and is headquartered in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom. GE Healthcare is the first GE business segment to be headquartered...
to offer a course in purification of biological reagents (such as DNA and protein) twice a year.
Marc Shuman, MD, QB3's clinical director, coordinates the "Anti-Medical School" (AMS) bioengineering course offered alternately at UCSF and UC Berkeley. The AMS is related to the Clinical Associates in that practicing clinicians present clinical challenges and work with students to identify technical solutions that might be found in the bioengineering laboratory.
QB3 administrates the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), which sends a team to the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM
IGEM
The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition is a worldwide Synthetic Biology competition aimed at undergraduate university students.- Competition details :...
) competition.
At QB3-Berkeley, staff coordinate undergraduate summer internships with biotech companies in the Bay Area.
QB3 is affiliated with the graduate program in computational and genomic biology at UC Berkeley.
Campus sites
At UC Berkeley, QB3 is centered at Stanley Hall, although many QB3 faculty labs are located elsewhere on campus.At UCSF, QB3 is located at Byers Hall on the Mission Bay campus. Byers Hall, officially opened in 2005, also currently hosts the QB3 director's office and QB3 central administration. Many faculty labs are in Genentech Hall, an adjoining building.
At UC Santa Cruz, QB3 forms part of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering, and occupies space in the Physical Sciences Building and Engineering 2.
In July 2011, QB3 announced that it was reorganizing internally to concentrate entrepreneurial activities and industry partnerships into a division called the InnoLab, and that the campus sites would focus on academic research.