| California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) | |
|---|---|
| Formation | December 15, 2000 |
| Type | Governor Gray Davis Institute for Science and Innovation |
| Headquarters | UCSF Mission Bay campus |
| Location | UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, UC Santa Cruz |
| Region served | San Francisco Bay Area |
| Membership | 216 faculty |
| Parent organization | University of California |
| Budget | $5 million |
| Staff | 31: 7 in the central office (at UCSF), 14 at UC Berkeley, 2 local staff at UCSF, 8 at UC Santa Cruz |
| Website | http://www.qb3.org |
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.
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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").[1] 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.[2]
QB3 is directed by Regis B. 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 Sali; at UC Santa Cruz, David Haussler.
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.[3] 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 Roy, Elizabeth Blackburn, Steven Chu, Joseph DeRisi, David Haussler, Jay Keasling, Arun Majumdar, and Harry Noller.
QB3 member scientists choose affiliations with one of nine research themes:
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. [4]
QB3 assists 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,[5] a package of services consisting of mentoring, incubator space, pre-commercial funding, and seed-stage venture 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." Funding is provided through collaborations with Johnson & Johnson, as well as the Rogers Family Foundation. [6]
QB3 also supports basic and applied research in selected regions of pharmaceutical chemistry through its industry alliance with Pfizer. [7] [8]
QB3 facilitates introductions to business mentors and venture capitalists in its network; offers the QED@QB3 seminar series on entrepreneurship;[9] and connects seasoned entrepreneurs to early stage startups via its Entrepreneur in Residence program[10]. [11]
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[12] 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.[13] 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 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[14] and Apple[15] 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 9,300-square-foot (860 m2) space in west Berkeley would house the QB3 East Bay Incubator, to officially launch in June 2011.[16]
In 2009, QB3 director Regis Kelly and associate director Douglas Crawford established Mission Bay Capital (MBC),[17] 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.[18] MBC's portfolio currently includes Redwood Bioscience,[19] a company based on "aldehyde tagging" technology developed in the laboratory of UC Berkeley professor Carolyn Bertozzi; and Calithera,[20] a cancer therapeutics startup launched by UCSF professor Jim Wells. (Bertozzi and Wells are members of QB3.)
The Startup in a Box program provides scientist-entrepreneurs with resources to start a company, such as legal advice and banking services. [21]
QB3 is not a technology transfer office and does not handle patent applications.
QB3 is involved in a number of educational initiatives.
QB3 does not offer accredited courses.
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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.[29]
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