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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
Vicinitas logo on a wavy background

Vicinitas Therapeutics Launches With $65 Million in Series A Financing to Advance Precision Medicines to Stabilize Key Proteins to Treat Disease

“The concept of chemically induced proximity – using multispecific molecules to bring two targets physically together – has yielded notable successes in the field of protein degradation,” said Jorge Conde, General Partner at a16z. “Vicinitas is leveraging its proprietary DUBTAC platform to pioneer the emerging space of targeted protein stabilization. This approach has the potential to access highly valued yet currently undruggable proteins and create differentiated therapies that will impact patient lives.” 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
A plate of Umaro's bacon made from seaweed

Vegan Bacon Brand from Shark Tank Hits Restaurants

Umaro dives into a new type of technology to create vegan alternatives. Co-founders Beth Zotter and Amanda Stiles picture the future of protein from seaweed farms, a sustainable solution in vegan meat production. The vegan company is the first to develop and use red seaweed protein as an umami-enhancing ingredient in their bacon. Read post
cartoon graphic of two people shaking hands

CF Foundation’s First ‘Golden Ticket’ Contest Announces Winners

“Our winners are great examples of the companies the Foundation wants to attract – bold, innovative, and unafraid of the challenges ahead. These are the types of early-stage technologies we need to nurture today to bring us closer to a cure for CF tomorrow,” Martin Mense, PhD, senior vice president of drug discovery and director of the CF Foundation Therapeutics Lab. Read post