News

Erasca Announces Closing of Initial Public Offering

Erasca, Inc., a clinical-stage precision oncology company singularly focused on discovering, developing, and commercializing therapies for patients with RAS/MAPK pathway-driven cancers, today announced the closing of its initial public offering of 21,562,500 shares of common stock, which includes...

Device taps brain waves to help paralyzed man communicate

University of California, San Francisco, neurosurgeon Dr. Edward Chang performs surgery at UCSF. In a medical first, researchers, led by Chang, harnessed the brain waves of a man paralyzed and unable to speak for 15 years - and turned what he intended to say into sentences on a computer screen. ...

Erasca to be valued at up to $1.8 billion

Erasca Inc. disclosed that it has set terms of its initial public offering, in which the California-based pre-revenue, clinical-stage precision oncology company could be valued up to $1.84 billion. University of California's researcher, Kevan Shokat PhD., is a lead contributor to Erasca's cancer...

UCSF and PrinterPrezz Collaborate to Produce a Layer of Personal Protection

Dr. Alessandro Villa, an Associate Professor at UC San Francisco, and PrinterPrezz, a trailblazer in combining polymer and metal 3D printing, nanotechnologies and surgical expertise to design and manufacture next generation medical devices, today announced a partnership to produce “The Cupola,” a...

The Next Pandemic?

Even with powerful vaccines in hand and the coronavirus waning across most of the United States, there’s still an urgent need for drugs to treat COVID-19 — and that could lay the foundation for the next generation of therapies for pandemics, say Bay Area scientists conducting such research. MORE

Sana Biotechnology Shows Survival of Transplanted Hypoimmune Stem Cells Without Immunosuppression in Non-Human Primates

First demonstration of the survival of allogeneic iPSCs transplanted into an immunocompetent non-human primate model without the need for immune suppression. Transplanting allogeneic cells into a primate without immune suppression represents a key step toward widespread treatment of disease using...

Akili launches digital campaign for first FDA-approved ADHD video game

Akili’s newly launched treatment for ADHD is a prescription—but not a drug. It's a video game. And the company is taking a fittingly digital approach to launching the first-of-its-kind FDA-approved product. MORE

Pionyr And Abcam Extend Partnership To Evaluate TREM2-Expressing Cells In Cancer Patients

 Pionyr Immunotherapeutics, Inc., a University of California, San Francisco founded company developing first-in-class antibody therapeutics that increase the body’s anti-tumor immunity and Abcam a global innovator in life science reagents and tools, announced the extension of their collaboration...

Neurona Therapeutics is dashing to the clinic with its cell therapy for epilepsy

Neurona Therapeutics unveiled a $41.5 million round on Tuesday morning, bringing the San Francisco-based biotech’s total raise to $135 million. The cash will be used to advance the company’s pipeline, including an upcoming Phase I/IIa for its lead candidate, NRTX-1001, in chronic focal epilepsy.

Next-generation T-cell therapeutics set sights on cancers, autoimmune disorders and more

"From my perspective there's no more important system in the body than the immune system, especially T cells," said Jeffrey Bluestone, Ph.D., an emeritus professor of medicine at the UCSF Diabetes Center and CEO of the T cell therapy company Sonoma Biotherapeutics. "T cells are potent, diverse and...