Depending on the field and stage of your research, often familiar funding sources do not fit the product development process. At UCSF, there are many non-traditional funding sources available that are designed to specifically support this process with access to customized industrial expertise and mentoring as well as non-dilutive seed funding.
Note that the funding opportunities on this page exclusively fund research in a UCSF academic lab; Other funding sources are available after a start-up has been incorporated.
1. Catalyst Program
The Catalyst Program provides customized industrial mentorship and funding for UCSF research projects at the early stages of development into a commercial product. Catalyst focuses on five areas:
- Therapeutics - Approaches to create and develop small molecules, biological drugs, cell and gene therapy, as well as other modalities
- Diagnostics - Approaches to create and develop assays for biomarkers of disease and precision medicine therapeutic approaches
- Medical Devices - Development of medical devices to address patient need
- Digital Health - Using digital technology to support the needs of patients
- Biotools - Approaches to create biological platforms for scientists
Once a year, Catalyst requests proposals from the UCSF community. Awardees receive funding and mentoring from industry experts to refine their ideas. The program continues to support the development of Catalyst projects, which may include additional funding, help with strategic industry partnering, and more.
Catalyst has over 80 active industry advisors who work with innovators to develop their research toward products for patient benefit.
Contact for more information:
Charles Hart, PhD
Director
[email protected]
2. UC Drug Discovery Consortium
The University of California Drug Discovery Consortium, (UC DDC) strives to leverage the biomedical research and commercialization strengths of the UC system to accelerate the development of life-saving therapies. The UC DDC is a cross-campus initiative created amongst seven University of California campus medical centers, with future goals to expand to all UC Campuses. Together, leaders from these institutes work to promote drug development by providing expertise in drug discovery education and training to UC researchers, promote access to related core facilities throughout the UC system for researchers and partners, and build relationships between industry partners and researchers for enhanced project translation.
Contact for more information:
Jason Gestwicki, PhD
Executive Committee Member & San Francisco Site Lead
[email protected]
3. The Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR) Innovation Awards Program
This Program aims to support early-stage technology development projects that could mature into future UC-LGR collaborative projects. Innovation Awards are one-year research grants to support labs at the UCSF and UC Berkeley campuses with an interest in developing highly innovative ideas into early proofs of concept across the field of functional genomics and CRISPR/Cas-based tool development. The goal for these awards is to support the development of novel platform technologies, disease-related model systems, and the application of these to functional genomics screens.
The current cycle is closed. We'll be back again next year.
5. National Science Foundation I-Corp
We are seeking your help with identifying PIs who are working on an early-stage healthcare product startup or startup idea.
UCSF’s National Science Foundation I-Corps program is part of the new Northwest NSF I-Corps Hub that includes UC Berkeley (lead institution), UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, Oregon State University, University of Washington, and University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Our campus announcement can be found here: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2024/11/428921/ucsf-joins-i-corps-new-regional-innovation-hub-northwest
The UCSF NSF I-corps program will host its training course focused on healthcare products, including therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, digital health, and platform technologies on April 21, April 23, and May 5 from 5 pm to 8 pm via zoom. The course is an immersive two-week virtual customer discovery training offered at no cost. The course is based on Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad that teaches teams to identify and refine value propositions and customer segments as well as accelerate finding product-market fit. Outside of the three evening class sessions, teams invest 30-35 hours conducting 20 interviews with potential customers as part of the customer discovery process. The instructor will be Seo Yeon Yoon, Director of Life Science Angels and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Lecturer.
Eligible teams that complete this course may qualify for the National NSF I-Corps program, which includes a $50,000 NSF grant. Additionally, teams that complete I-corps are three times more likely to be awarded a Small Business Innovation Research grant and nearly 1,400 of these teams have launched startups which have cumulatively raised $3.16 billion in subsequent funding.
Please contact [email protected] and [email protected] with any questions.