Be Part of the Launch Team
UCSF Innovation Ventures catalyzes the commercialization of UCSF discoveries. We identify and co-develop promising innovations into market-ready startups, ensuring they are investment-ready and poised to deliver public benefit.
Our Executives-in-Residence (XiRs) – experienced entrepreneurs – provide crucial business planning and commercialization roadmaps for new therapeutics, devices, dHealth, and diagnostics.
We invite enthusiastic, successful XiR candidates to join us. For XiR Program inquiries, contact Darya Bubman at [email protected].
Arun Wiita, Althea Stillman, and Innovation Ventures Programmers Discuss the XiR Program
Launching a company, especially a medical technology company, is not a simple task. Many great discoveries have been left to gather dust in the storage closet of some research laboratory for lack of a plan to commercialize the science. That is why the University of California, San Francisco has invested in Innovation Ventures, a team created to ensure that our best ideas don’t get left in the lab. And Innovation Ventures has crafted programs to seek out, nurture, and launch those ideas as fully formed healthcare technologies. The program I want to focus on today is the Executive in Residence, or XiR, program, where innovators are paired with entrepreneurs to launch a NewCo based on healthcare technology. In this episode, we speak with the Innovation Ventures team who run the program, Todd Pazdera and Darya "Dasha" Bubman, as well as UCSF Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Arun Wiita, whose scientific discovery was accepted into the XiR program, and Althea Stillman, a company builder and biotech investor, who joined the program to help usher in Arun’s technology, and has agreedTo take on the CEO role of this fledgling startup they have been working on, called SEEN Therapeutics.
Listen to the SEEN Therapeutics Interview
Current XiRs