 We'd love for just a couple of you to share very, very briefly what it is you hope to get from the session. Anyone? Are you volunteering or are you volunteering the mic? Oh, excellent. Thank you. Hi, good evening. I'm an entrepreneur. I've helped early stage and mid-stage companies with translating their science into business value for prospective funding, Series A and Series B. I also helped build pipelines particularly in the area of neglect and infectious diseases. I came to your seminar because I'm particularly interested in understanding more about the challenges or perhaps identify how we could best help UCSF and other universities to move from the office of technology transfer for some of the scientists and how they can help in terms of what we can or I can do and some of my colleagues in moving that out to the business world. So how can you help facilitate improving connections between UCSF and industry opportunities? Anyone else? Well, yeah, I'll just offer since I do have the mic. I'm an alumni of UCSF. I finished my doctoral work in 1983. I was on the faculty here for several years and then I went to the dark side, became an attorney and so I'm an intellectual property counsel and I've been interested in the CBE program for many, many years. I participated in it in years past and I just always like to see how things are evolving and growing. So I'm here to learn and to meet folks. Okay, to learn in general about where academia is. Hello, I'm helping actually build a couple companies that are started from university research and the founders who maintain their academic labs are critical to those companies and yet they're in academia and they have to take their whole approach of how they did science in academia to translate it to a commercial product and there's a lot of different transitions each person has to make and I'm just, as the business side of the equation, I'm always interested to hear people like you speak on this subject of just about how do you go about this process because the world needs better research than what's coming out of pharmaceutical and device companies. So you're interested in understanding a little bit more about the world that your founders are coming from that may shed some insights into their behaviors when it's strange, for example. That's a joke. Unpredictable. Well, I think it's an apprenticeship experience to figure out how to do it, right? We don't have a path. What we've been relying on is a few opportunistic examples and in my case it's drugs coming out of Big Pharma and I think the ideas are sitting inside of academia and we just have to continue to work on creating a new model for getting that to be the pipeline of the future. Great. Great. So we're not really going to go through the entire room on this one but just wanted to get a flavor for who's here. Sorry, but I don't want to stop someone. I'll just do a little retort because I'm from Big Pharma and I work on devices and inhalable drugs and you're right. It's a very slow process and there's a lot of money wasted and I don't necessarily think the interest is in discovering cures as much as creating repeat users and I've started to get involved in the startup scene mostly in the hopes that things can move faster because academia is slow and Big Pharma is slow and wasteful and startups might have some hope. Great. Right. Unless there's something burning someone wants to contribute or actually that you think is different from what you've heard. That would be so go ahead. There's something different on that. Hi. I'm a postdoc from UC Berkeley and I'm in the process of starting a postdoc entrepreneur program on the campus there and my idea is to bring together scientists highly talented postdocs and teach them some business skills as opposed to idea to IPO. I want to teach them idea to funding level. Very few companies go to IPOs. So if you can just teach them how to do the business skills and probably from collaboration with the people in business school and the law school I think you'll form better teams and better companies and better startups. Great. Okay. Let's move on. That's great. So I think we're going to integrate these threads into the talk. So this is good. I think you're in the right place and I think we're in the right place. So that's great. So many of you have probably seen a representation like this and this is just a flag the challenge. In this particular case we're talking about the fact that the discovery and introduction of new therapeutic interventions have not kept base with a lot of the science, a lot of the funding. That's the general problem. I think you've all seen variants of this graph. But the bottom line, the reason why we are here as part of CTSI is because the NIH chose to respond to that. And so the way they chose to respond to it and this was about five years ago was with the launch of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards. There's a related consortium of what will be 60 institutions. It's currently 55 of the top biomedical institutions in the country. So the CTSAs were established in 2006. And so this meant that the NIH was giving chunks of money. It was a competitive grant process to these institutions. And it's unique because this money wasn't going to be given for research itself. This money was going to be given to help improve the culture of research specifically to help advance clinical and translational research. So they said, well, and they also didn't just give the money. They talked about this as a partnership, which is a different kind of an arrangement. And they actually worked very closely with us. So they were going to partner with the top institutions and put them into a network. And the goal was to transform these gaps that we have. The minefield that I think Cathy Giacomini called it. So we applied in the first year. UCSF applied in the first year and we actually scored really well. And for several years we were the largest awardee. We got about 117 million over five years, which is a lot of money if you think about it. As I said, none of this is actually going to fund research directly. There's a small piece that does and I'll tell you about that in a moment. But we've just finished our competitive renewal and we are funded again for another five years. And we'll remain one of the top CTSAs. The other big CTSA with us is Harvard CTSA. And then the rest are considerably smaller. So they go down to like an 80% level or 75% level of funding for us. But all the big players are in the mix. Hopkins and Stanford, everyone is in the mix at this point. And I mentioned that we are part of a national network. I won't be talking much about the network here, but if you have questions, we can discuss that. So the theory is there are things that you should be doing yourself and improving your situation in your university and your academic setting. And then there are things that are better done with others. And so that's what we're supposed to work on at the consortium level. And I would say generally speaking, I think everyone would agree that overall five years are over for the first class that we've done better at creating change at the local level and probably less well at leveraging each other through this national consortium. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about us very briefly. But the main goals are this. So why am I telling you about us? So I'm telling you about us so that you can ask questions if you're interested in how change occurs within an academic setting. That's really what we've been about. We came in, UCSF did things in one way and our job was to change that or improve that. So that's one whole area. I'm probably going to speak less about that in this talk, but that's something that if you're interested in, we can talk about. I also wanted to tell you specifically within UCSF the services and resources that are available for some of you. So for you as opposed to from Berkeley, we don't have an official relationship with Berkeley on all counts. We're actually doing some very interesting things with Berkeley right now. But the idea would be that you would have access to a whole bunch of resources and guidance that you may not otherwise have. So I'm going to give you a snapshot of what those are. And then there's some other... So I want to tell you about also just lastly that one of the ways to think about CTSI is that we're a gateway to UCSF. So at the simplest level, we actually have launched an expertise mining and discovery tool that will help you find experts, but we also provide that service. So we are a good gateway if you want to meet the right people at UCSF given your need. So those are the reasons that I'm going to talk about CTSI a little bit very briefly, but first, the mission is pretty obvious. We want to accelerate research to bring, as we call it, better health to more people more quickly. The better health to more people more quickly I think was coined by our first PI, Mike McEwen. We are a multifaceted organization. We're actually a very strange beast. It's been said that we're more too complicated for our own good. And the reason is that we work with people at all ends of the translational spectrum. So most of you are interested in what we think of as the early part of the translational spectrum, identifying targets, doing first-in-human studies, some clinical trial stuff. But translation actually is all the way from the basic initial idea to actually changing health, health metrics, like where it matters. And so we actually are doing work at all those ends. And if you think about it, that's very different kinds of work. So the person that's in their lab working on an animal model, getting ready for a first-in-human, their life and what they're focused on is very different from the people that are the other end of the spectrum that are talking about how do we actually change health in the tenderloin? How do we get asthma rates down in the city of San Francisco? And we are actually working across all that. That's why we're a strange beast because the cultures and politics, indeed, of people at the ends of the spectrum are very different. That makes it fun. So we're multifaceted also for another reason. We're strange because we're funded by the NIH primarily. We also have other funding. But we are within the structure of this academic organization. So the leader, and I'll talk later, the PI for CTSI, Clay Johnston, is the Associate Vice Chancellor of Research. So he is right up there in campus leadership. We are plugged into everything just as anyone might be if they were funded directly by UCSF. But in fact, we're funded by the NIH. And so we're in this strange kind of collaborative space. So we work by doing three things. We drive changes at the university to give you a flavor of that. One of the things we're working on is looking at IRB reciprocity. So ways in which if someone wants to work with one UC, but then also include other UCs, they're not going to have to submit to several different IRBs. Simple point, huge problem gets in the way for a lot of people. It was supposedly solved a while back. It really wasn't. But we are actually working with the consortium of folks that are making it happen. And so that's the kind of culture change almost that we're setting in place, but also in process engineering change. So that's just to give you a flavor of some of these larger structural changes we work on. But in addition, we build programs and actually directly deliver services. I'll tell you a little bit about that when they're not available otherwise. And then finally, we do provide comprehensive training. So we have training programs and clinical and translational research all the way from some early translational stuff all the way to what we call implementation and dissemination sciences. So that's on the far end of translation. But it's matched to people who have MDs. You do a certain kind of training. If you have a PhD, we've got opportunities for you there. If you want a summer course because you're a resident and you don't have much time, we've got that. You want a degree course, we've got that. So we've got really a lot of things covered. And then we partner with a lot of people. For example, QB3 is a core partner for us in most of what we do. People. So I mentioned that we are led by Clay Johnston, who's a neurologist. Deborah Grady is our associate PI. And she works in women's health issues. Both of them have campus positions. And then we have a fantastic board of physician scientists. And the board includes June and myself, who you have here with you today. And June will introduce much more about herself in a bit. But when I talk about us being a gateway to UCSF, the other thing we do is we bring people like June and bring her into the mix and provide her with what we hope is going to be a dazzling opportunity to do things that we never have done when she was in Genentech. So bring some of what she's learned from Genentech and infuse that into our culture so that we change the way we do things at UCSF. I'm a PhD, gone wayward. And I actually have a long and not a torrid path, but a long windy path to where I've come. But I think June's background is going to be particularly interesting to you and she'll speak to it in a moment. So I wanted to give you a flavor of some of the things we actually do. So right from sort of early translation to later, we fund pilot projects. So this is one place where we do actually fund things. So we have a pilot funding program. It happens to be called Strategic Opportunity Support SOS, like the song. And so that's where we fund your 25K for people who have ideas. And you submit just like you would for any other pilot program. Now, along the way, I do want to tell you about how we provide services, but if you want to change academia along the way, we've not just provided the funds. We thought, huh, we're providing funds, but there are like six, 10 other organizations at UCSF that provide intramural funds, right? So then let's think about the person, you know, the investigator, the postdoc who's interested in getting intramural funds because they've got a great idea. So how do they go find out about this stuff? Well, in the old world, they found out about it by searching the internet, hoping they had a great mentor. And by the way, that's a great unleveler of the playing field. If you've got a great mentor, you're set because they know all the opportunities and they're committed to you. You don't have a good mentor. You don't have to worry about any of the opportunities. That actually may be great. So that was the old world. So there were opportunities and you didn't know where to go. What we did was not only do we provide pilot funding, we actually worked with other people that provided pilot funding. So the Center for AIDS Research provides pilot funding. The School of Medicine had a pool of money that provides pilot funding. The Academic Senate has money for, you know, for pilots. And we've gotten them all together and now we've created this umbrella organization. Again, we love acronyms called RAP, Resource Allocation Program. But the bottom line is it's one place. It's one place where investigators can go and they get to see all the opportunities across all intramural funding agencies. And so they can match themselves up. In addition, we've tried to simplify the process. And that's, again, process engineering. We have two deadlines. That's the kind of, I just wanted to give you a flavor of the kind of thing we want to do, not just provide money, but every time we're trying to think about, well, how could this be done better to improve the life of investigators so they can work on their ideas and get stuff out. So we fund pilot projects. We provide matchmaking. What I'm calling here is matchmaking. You can think of it as expert guidance, customized guidance, and dollars to advance early research. Now, this is an area that's a program we have called the T1 Catalyst Program that June's going to tell you a lot about. It's fantastic. It's about a year old, I think, and it's just improving all the time. I think that's going to give you some really good examples about how we help people with ideas. A little bit like the postdoc group that was talked about, but really match people up with venture capital that's suitable IP professionals if that's what you need, things like that. In general, we provide expert advice. It's called consultation services, which is we match people up. So you've got it. You're writing a grant and you want to get money, but you're not sure if you've written your aims in a way that's really going to sync up with the institute that's funding. Well, you can come to us and we actually match you up with faculty, successful faculty who are really good at getting grants and depending on the field, sometimes in biostatistics, a senior staff member who can really help you think through that section so you're successful. And so we provide consultation in a range of areas, some big chunk areas like biostats which you really need help with. That's just something everyone needs help with. And then we also have niche consulting. So right now we have some niche consulting in mobile health. So you have an idea in mobile health that we can connect you to people that are actually renowned international experts in doing that. And as a service to UCSF and the affiliates, the first hour is free, which is great. After that, we do ask for payment. So that's another piece, by the way, of our culture that we're changing at UCSF. We want to connect people up to the outside and get them good ideas, but we also want to change the culture internally where some things are subsidized, but a lot of it, and we have to do that for our own sustainability, are based on a recharge model. So that's just another general piece. We provide training, as I mentioned. We have a huge clinical research services program. We actually have sites where you can do research. We have trained research nursing staff. And we've launched the first UCSF participant recruitment service. So I think all of you are aware that one of the biggest barriers to doing clinical research is actually recruiting participants. And the statistics on how many trials fail because either you haven't recruited even one person, or you've recruited some, but not enough in the time frame, are pretty horrifying. There have been articles in the New York Times about this. So it's a generally accepted problem. So we're trying to solve that. We provide tools, software tools, other kinds of tools to identify the resources and people you need to meet. And then as an example, as we do demonstrate, and this is a big project we have on the table right now, how research can tie to measurable changes in health. So this is a little bit more about that far end of the translational spectrum. So we have a program called the San Francisco Bay Area Health Improvement Project. So that actually asks, are there health concerns that the community prioritizes that we can actually affect by connecting the right researchers at UCSF with the right partners out in the world? And then what are those metrics? What should our target be? And then over five years, we're going to shoot for that. And we're going to measure whether we actually can change health by making that connection from our environment to health. To do that, the partners are actually big, but they're partners like the Department of Public Health has to be on board. The school district has to be on board and we also have, I mean, through this process, we've brought together hill physicians in Brown and Tolland into one room and they apparently have not been in a room for a while, but because everybody, this is something everybody can get together on to improve health, they are coming together so that there's some things that they know they can do together to, again, impact a real health metric. So I'm just flagging that as something way out there in the spectrum, but it really, it ties in the early translational work to something real. I'm not going to go through this. I just wanted to give you a sense of both our impact and culture with two metrics and then I'm going to hand off to June to continue on specifically focusing on her area herself and early translational research. So two things. So one, so we're really interested in measuring our impact and we've got a whole emphasis right now on actually what we want to have is public dashboards that display, not just internally for us, but out to the world that really talk about how we're doing and how we're impacting productivity, research productivity at UCSF. So it's a little scary making, but I think it's really good and it could really change our culture. But this is sort of one of those shining star impact points where we invested 485,000 in these multi-disciplinary research awards that ended up securing us $10 million. We were very successful. I think it's something like six out of 14 of the people that ended up going from their pilot and actually submitting for these large grants were successful, which is a huge success rate. So that process ended up being great. It had a great return on investment. I'm not saying that every one of our pieces is going to give us numbers like that, but that's fantastic. And that's what we're looking at, is doing work where we can seed things and we get this kind of a multiplication factor in ROI. And the other piece I wanted to mention is moral cultural thing. So again, if you want to change culture, you've got to be on the edge as well. We're trying to do things where we shake things up. I talked about the public dashboards, for example. We're going to talk about our productivity as well, way out in the public for everyone to see and for us to see as well and for us to know it amongst our programs. But similarly, when we wrote the renewal proposal that we've just been funded for, we actually had an open mechanism to get input from the entire university and we used a crowdsourcing tool to get ideas for what we would then put into our renewal. And normally you would think that people were competitive about their ideas, but this ended up being a very positive experience and actually there were folks who wanted to do things that heard about each other's ideas. Now I'm not talking about research, by the way, because I'm very interested in thinking about open ways to do research, but this was actually ways in which we could change the research environment. Things we could do, for example, to improve industry-academic relationships. And these are people that maybe invested in actually working in this area and yet they were okay. Well, they had to be okay. Some of it is just to make people do things and they submitted great ideas and we went through a process where we got their input into which were the best ideas which came to the top and those were the ones that went into our renewal. So just to share with you that we're also doing things differently in front of Achieve Our Mission and I think it's necessary if you want to shake things up a little bit.