California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences

History

QB3 was founded in 2000 as one of four Governor Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation (originally, California Institutes for Science and Innovation, or "Cal ISIs"). From a 2005 article written for the University of California Systemwide Senate:

The Institutes were launched in 2000 as an ambitious statewide initiative to support research in fields that were recognized as critical to the economic growth of the state—biomedicine, bioengineering, nanosystems, telecommunications and information technology. Moreover, the Cal ISIs were conceived as a catalytic partnership between university research interests and private industry that could expand the state economy into new industries and markets and “speed the movement of innovation from the laboratory into peoples' daily lives” (Governor’s Budget summary 2001-02). The four research centers operate as a partnership among the University, state government, and industry, and each involves structured collaborations among campuses, disciplines, academics researchers, research professional, and students.

Leadership

QB3 is directed by Regis B. Kelly, a neuroscientist formerly executive vice-chancellor at UCSF from 2001 to 2004. Kelly's office is in the central QB3 office suite at the UCSF Mission Bay campus. On each UC campus, QB3 is led by a campus director, who is an active research scientist: at UC Berkeley, Susan Marqusee; at UCSF, Nevan Krogan; at UC Santa Cruz, David Haussler.

Faculty

Research faculty are the foundation of QB3. QB3 currently has about 240 faculty members: about 100 from UC Berkeley, 85 from UCSF, and 55 from UC Santa Cruz. The research interests of these faculty fall under the umbrella of the quantitative biosciences. QB3 scientists tend to be bioengineers, biophysicists, or pharmaceutical or computational biologists. Synthetic biology is strongly represented. Current and former members of QB3 include Shuvo Roy, Elizabeth Blackburn, Steven Chu, Joseph DeRisi, David Haussler, Jay Keasling, Arun Majumdar, and Harry Noller.

Research

QB3 member scientists choose affiliations with one of nine research themes:

Activities

A major function of QB3 is to make connections between scientists in different disciplines and between entrepreneurial scientists and business mentors and venture capitalists. QB3 administers buildings custom-designed to facilitate interaction and core facilities intended to bring together researchers from different fields. QB3 also provides networking services for applied research and technology commercialization. QB3 is not a technology transfer office and does not handle patent applications.

Startups

QB3 assists life science entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area seeking to commercialize their research.

QB3 supports basic and applied research on the biology of aging-related disease through its partnership with Calico (company).

QB3 operates one full-service incubator (QB3@953) and two campus incubators, and is a partner in an affiliated shared med/tech laboratory (StartX-QB3 Labs) near the Stanford campus in Palo Alto.

The QB3 Garage@UCSF was founded in September 2006 in Byers Hall on the UCSF Mission Bay campus, and the QB3 Garage@Berkeley was launched in April 2010 in Stanley Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. The Garages offer laboratory space to spinoff companies affiliated with the University of California. Garage tenants pay market rates for increments as small as 120 square feet (11 m²) and have the opportunity to use QB3 core scientific facilities (but pay standard rates). There is a time limit of two years for occupancy.

In April 2011, QB3 and Wareham Development, a real estate company, announced that a 9,300-square-foot (860 m²) space in west Berkeley would house the QB3 East Bay Incubator, which launched in June 2011. The status of the QB3-EBIC as a multi-company space is currently uncertain.

In May 2013, QB3 and Dewey Land Company announced a partnership to renovate and outfit a 24,000-square-foot (2,200 m²) former warehouse in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood as a full-service life science incubator. The building, "QB3@953," opened in October 2013. Now fully occupied, the building houses about 45 startups. (The number fluctuates as tenants leave and move in.)

In August 2014, QB3 and StartX announced a partnership in a med/tech incubator, named StartX-QB3 Labs, located near the Stanford campus and Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto. It has the capacity to house 16 companies.

In 2009, QB3 director Regis Kelly and associate director Douglas Crawford established Mission Bay Capital, LLC (MBC), a venture capital firm currently with $36 million under management. MBC's portfolio currently includes Redwood Bioscience, a company based on "aldehyde tagging" technology developed in the UC Berkeley laboratory of professor Carolyn Bertozzi, now at Stanford; and Calithera, a cancer therapeutics startup launched by UCSF professor Jim Wells.

In May 2013 QB3 announced a partnership with major industry allies Bayer, Novartis, Pfizer, and Roche to identify and fund promising life science startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The QB3 Startup in a Box program provides scientist-entrepreneurs with resources to start a company, such as legal advice and banking services.

Education

QB3 is involved in a number of educational initiatives.

QB3 does not offer accredited courses, nor does it hire faculty.

Campus sites

In July 2011, QB3 announced that it was reorganizing internally to concentrate entrepreneurial activities and industry partnerships into a division called the InnoLab, and that the campus sites would focus on academic research.