The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences is a nonprofit research and technology commercialization institute spanning three University of California campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area: UC Berkeley, UCSF, and UC Santa Cruz. QB3's domain is the quantitative biosciences: areas of biology in which advances are chiefly made by scientists applying techniques from physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science.
History
QB3 was founded in 2000 as one of four Governor Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation. 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”. 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:
Biological Imaging: visualizing biological systems at all scales: atoms, cells, organs
Biomaterials & Stem Cells: Development of biomaterials and stem cells for biotechnology and therapeutic applications.
Biomolecular Structure and Mechanism: structure, function and dynamics of macromolecules
Cellular Dynamics: biochemical and biophysical analysis of cellular processes; visualizing biological systems at all scales: atoms, cells, organs
Chemical Biology: applying the tools of chemistry to biology, aiding in drug discovery and interrogation of biology
Genotype to Phenotype: harvesting the information in genomes and the effect of variation
Precision Measurement & Control of Biological Systems: developing the ability to mechanically, optically or chemically alter and monitor biology for interrogation and diagnostics.
Synthetic Biology: design, redesign and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems
Theoretical Modeling of Biological Systems: Theoretical and computational analysis of macromolecules, biological systems, and interpretation of experimental data
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.
QB3 supports basic and applied research on the biology of aging-related disease through its partnership with Calico.
Incubators
QB3 operates one full-service incubator and two campus incubators, and is a partner in an affiliated shared med/tech laboratory 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 and have the opportunity to use QB3 core scientific facilities. There is a time limit of two years for occupancy. In April 2011, QB3 and Wareham Development, a real estate company, announced that a 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 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. 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.
Seed-Stage Venture Funding
In 2009, QB3 director Regis Kelly and associate director Douglas Crawford established Mission Bay Capital, LLC, 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.
QB3 Collaborative Startups
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.
QB3 Startup in a Box
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.
UC Berkeley Biophysics: In 2012 QB3 became administrators of the biophysics graduate program at UC Berkeley.
Graduate Program in Computational and Genomic Biology: QB3 is affiliated with the doctoral program in computational and genomic biology at UC Berkeley.
Undergraduate Internships: At QB3-Berkeley, staff coordinate undergraduate summer internships with biotech companies in the Bay Area.
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.
UCSF: Byers Hall on the Mission Bay campus. Byers Hall, officially opened in 2005, also currently hosts the QB3 director's office and QB3 central administration. Many faculty labs are in Genentech Hall, an adjoining building.
