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Prof. Amy Herr is the Executive Director of the Bakar Bioenginuity Hub (BBH) and Prof. Regis Kelly is the Director of Bakar Labs at the University of California, Berkeley. BBH is a new campus initiative that aims to launch the startups at , a...
Prof. Amy Herr is the Executive Director of the Bakar Bioenginuity Hub (BBH) and Prof. Regis Kelly is the Director of Bakar Labs at the University of California, Berkeley. BBH is a new campus initiative that aims to launch the startups at Bakar Labs, a world-class incubator. The facility is open to teams from around the world — a space where anyone can leverage all that Berkeley has to offer. Bakar labs will rent labs and offices to as many as 80 startup companies. The incubator will also provide extensive equipment with additional access to core facilities at UC Berkeley, so startups can bring life changing technologies to fruition.
We talk about the origin story, the effort needed to transform a former Berkeley Art Museum to a biotech incubator; patient capital and resources being deployed to support the startups; partnerships being developed internally and externally; programming to benefit students and faculty on campus; intellectual property; changing biotech landscape and the vision for this magnum opus experiment.
Shownotes
Bakar Bioenginuity Hub and Bakar Labs
Speaker Bios: Prof. Amy Herr, Prof. Regis Kelly
- Trainees complained about not providing training or pathways for non-academic career pathways
- Faculty couldn't fill much about public service in their promotion packages
- Reg comes out of his retirement to head QB3
- Entrepreneurship was more vibrant on the engineering side of the campus but not much on the life sciences side
- Born out of a vision for maintaining and expanding UC Berkeley's research eminence by growing on the innovation and entrepreneurship front
- Easiest way for university research to work with big pharma and biotech was through startups
- Convergence of ideas from different points of view made BBH happen
- There is a need for building academic innovation centers to benefit the people funding academic research
- A historic art museum (artistic heritage) was converted to a life sciences incubator
- There was no money to renovate the museum! Some innovative thinking and generous donors helped transform it to a life sciences incubator.
- Lessons for other universities could potentially learn to build such innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems
- How does one get accepted to BBH?
- BBH is open to problem solvers all over the world- not just to UC Berkeley affiliates
- Women have been excelling at building companies. A lot more needs to be done to support Latino and other underrepresented minorities to build startups
- Big philanthropies are investing in deeptech to deploy patient capital
- A new Ph.D. fellowship program to support entrepreneurship efforts of PhD students for the last two years of their program
- Phenomenal partnerships with every possible player in the ecosystem being built- biotech, pharma, VCs, law firms and more
- Intellectual property will be owned by the startups
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