UCSF moves toward bio Silicon Valley

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) announced yesterday that the institution is strengthening a series of partnerships to develop technologies that aim to treat neurodegenerative disease.

Researchers from UCSF’s Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases are working with the Tokyo-based pharmaceutical company Daiichi Sankyo to further the research of the institute’s director, Stanley Prusiner, MD, who received a Nobel prize for his work in this area. The goal of this collaboration is to develop molecular diagnostic and therapeutic agents.

Closer to home, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center and a professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry, is collaborating with UC San Diego’s Swartz Center and Nvidia, producers of powerful computer chips, to create a novel and semi-transparent 3D mapping system of the brain called GlassBrain. The imaging system synchronizes electrical input and molecular MRI imaging to light connections in the brain that could help researchers treat brain disorders, including multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease.

“I want us to have a platform that enables us to be more creative and aggressive in thinking how software and hardware can be a new medicine to improve brain health,” Gazzaley said in the report. “Often, high-tech innovations take a decade to move beyond the entertainment industry and reach science and medicine. That needs to change.”

These and other partnerships are moving toward business relationships and not just research grants. “We need to know what companies are looking for and how to align our goals,” said Gazzaley. “We just have to point in the same direction and appeal to their public interests. What I found in my experience doing this is that we have to demonstrate our value as a real partner and not just be a charity case.”