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BrightEdge's Farnaz Bakshi (center) presents Golden Ticket to Brad Niles, CEO of ARIZ (third from left) along with the BrightEdge and Bakar Labs teams
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ARIZ and Catena Awarded Golden Tickets to Bakar Labs, Sponsored by ACS BrightEdge Fund

With the Golden Tickets, ARIZ and Catena each win one year of free office and lab space at Bakar Labs and access to BrightEdge’s robust network of resources to develop their cancer therapies. They will be able to access Berkeley campus resources, connect with Bakar Labs' business affiliates, and network with more than 30 fellow tenant companies. The combination of support from Bakar Labs and BrightEdge will, most importantly, allow ARIZ and Catena to bring their technology to patients sooner.

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BBH interior. Main lobby seen from top floor

MBH Architects & BBH Recognized in Interior Design’s 2022 Best of Year Awards

Interior Design's Best of Year is the design industry's premiere design awards program, honoring the most significant work of the year as well as recognizing designers, architects, and manufacturers from around the globe. Read post
Three burgers made with Black Sheep plant-based lamb

Black Sheep Foods Grabs $12.3M to Craft Tastier Plant-Based Meats

Venture capital into the food tech sector has been waning recently. However, by making flavors and also using them, Kumar believes Black Sheep Foods’ new funding is the result of setting the company up for a vertical integration approach that puts it in a unique space done only by Impossible Foods thus far. He adds the new round was planned and follows progress on some of the key things the company has set out to do in 2022, including the rate of product adoption and R&D milestones on its flavors. Read post
A group photo of 5 people at Bakar Labs. CEO Greg Went is far left, with CSO Jack Nguyen to his right.

Tenant Spotlight: Reflexion Pharmaceuticals & The Mirror World of D-Therapeutics

CEO Greg Went appreciates that our time on Earth is short. What he cares about is helping patients with medicines that work. He doesn’t have time for the ego that some scientists have tied up in the technologies they’re developing. He admits that, early on, even his company was too into itself. “What Reflexion lacked early on was the mentality of ‘why develop this technology if it’s not better than monoclonal antibodies.’ ‘Same as’: we don’t need that. We need products that are a factor of two to ten times better than the standard of care.” Read post
A bench along one of BBH's custom angled exterior concrete walls

Retrofitting a Classic – Bakar BioEnginuity Hub

Every aspect of our building is innovative! “What we ended up with was this really cool system of ‘stealth’ looking concrete walls,” Price explains. “They had extreme angles – from 45 degrees to 60 degrees, that were top-cast finished with an EcoSand final finish.” Being large stretches of concrete, there was also concern about skateboarders, so a custom stainless-steel system of skateboard deterrence was designed to replicate the human genome and installed on the face of the battered walls. Read post
Katy Digovich at Bakar Labs

At Minutia, Katy Digovich Is Tackling Diabetes Cell by Cell

But while continuing to work in Africa with the Clinton Health Access Initiative, she learned she couldn't get far enough away. People were surprised when they learned that the nearly 6-foot-tall, athletic-looking Digovich — a former basketball player in college — was living with Type 1 diabetes, a diagnosis in Africa that often translates into stunted growth, amputation and high mortality. "Ultimately, I got really angry and the switch flipped. If I was born there, I would be dead. That really hit close to home," she said. "I took stock of my career and threw myself into the diabetes space." Read post
Photo of the Bakar Labs lobby, skylight, and part of the main office floor

BBH Wins 2022 Preservation Design Award for Rehabilitation

The Bakar BioEnginuity Hub is a winner for the 2022 Preservation Design Award for Rehabilitation. Award recipients are selected by a jury of top professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, planning, and history, as well as renowned architecture critics and journalists. Read post
Valitor Team

Tenant Spotlight: Valitor Aligns Its Stakeholders to Develop Biopolymer Therapeutics

“Getting the science right is hard enough, but at least I was trained to be a scientist,” says CSO and former CEO Wesley Jackson. “The skill that I had to learn the quickest was to keep all the company’s stakeholders aligned. I naively assumed that if the science was great enough, it would be sufficient to launch the business. But, instead, I found that a company can only exist because there is a team of people who have an interest in it existing." Read post
Valitor CEO Steven Lo (left) and President & CSO Wes Jackson (right)

Valitor Raises $28M Series B to Develop Therapy for Age-Related Macular Degeneration

The company will spend next year testing its multivalent polymer to prep for a clinical trial in 2024. The goal is to create an injectable that can last six months, meaning patients with wet AMD, a chronic eye condition that blurs vision and can sometimes cause blind spots, would only need two injections per year, kind of like going to the dentist, quipped Wesley Jackson, co-founder, president and CSO, in an interview with Endpoints News ahead of the launch. Read post
Perlumi's Chris Eiben at the bench.

Tenant Spotlight: Perlumi’s Plan to Perfect Photosynthesis 

“We can’t make more land, so we need to be more efficient with it. One way to do this is to make plants fundamentally better at photosynthesis. If you make photosynthesis better, you solve a lot of problems at the same time. You increase food security, you can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere for the long term, and you can spare land for biodiversity.”  Read post
Illustration of protein being sequenced

Glyphic Biotechnologies Wins $409K SBIR Grant From NIH

Congratulations to Glyphic Biotechnologies! NIH recently reported the company had been awarded a $409 SBIR grant for their project "Single-molecule protein sequencing by iterative isolation and identification of N-terminal amino acids." The company is developing and commercializing technology to sequence proteins — instead of DNA. They're hiring! Read post
Josh Yang and Daniel Estandian at the bench at Bakar Labs

Bringing Biotech to Market: Master of Translational Medicine Alum Advances Medical Technologies With Two Startups

Co-founded last year with fellow Berkeley alum Daniel Estandian, VC-funded Glyphic Biotechnologies’ single-molecule protein sequencer may upend the way that pharmaceuticals are developed. By modifying the standard process for sequencing proteins — including the use of a novel molecule that improves identification — their results are not only more accurate but also significantly faster than the predominant methods being used today. Read post
The Catena team (L-R: Samantha Brady, Chanez Symister, Maxwell Nguyen, Marco Lobba) at the opening launch event for Bakar Labs and the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub. UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser.

Tenant Spotlight: Catena Biosciences and Next-Generation Protein Coupling

How can we direct therapeutics to where we want them to take effect? Often the solution lies in attaching, or conjugating, a therapy to another molecule that performs the targeting function. “We discovered a new protein conjugation process that allowed us to build things like CRISPR base editors,” says Catena CEO and co-founder Marco Lobba. “It’s not just applicable to Cas9, but also to antibodies, cell-based therapies, and several other types of new drugs." Read post
BridgeBio logo

BridgeBio Pharma Announces Founding Affiliation with Bakar Labs, Incubator at UC Berkeley’s Bakar BioEnginuity Hub

“Partnering with UC Berkeley and QB3 to launch Bakar Labs is a natural extension of our mission to discover, create, test, and deliver transformative medicines to as many patients as possible. Through this collaboration, we aim to strengthen the Bay Area biotech ecosystem and potentially unlock new therapies for patients with unmet needs,” said BridgeBio founder and CEO Neil Kumar, Ph.D. Read post