In a First, UC Berkeley Showcasing Startups Around J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
By Ron Leuty in the San Francisco Business Times.
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.
Read the full story at the San Francisco Business Times.
