Innovation & Entrepreneurship News

Up to 20 percent of UTIs are caused by a particularly resistant microbe known as ESBL-producing bacteria. These infections do not respond to the standard antibiotic treatment. With support as a 2019-2020 Bakar FellowNiren Murthy, professor of bioengineering, and colleagues have developed a 30-minute, low-tech test, called DETECT, to identify ESBL-producing bacteria on a patient’s first visit to the doctor.

CO2 concentration in fresh air is about 400 parts per million (ppm). But get a group of people packed in a closed indoor space, and CO2 concentration can rise quickly.  Recent studies suggest that as levels increase above 1,000 ppm, decision-making and other cognitive abilities decline. Roya Maboudian studies the properties of nano-materials, including how their surfaces affect their performance. As a 2019-2020 Bakar Fellow, she is developing small, inexpensive and sensitive CO2 sensors.

They’re microscopic miners. Some species of aquatic bacteria draw in dissolved iron from their watery environment and store it in specialized compartments called magnetosomes. They use its magnetic properties to navigate, sort of like ancient mariners using a lodestone to keep their bearings. Arash Komeili, Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology and one of this year’s Bakar Fellows, aims to understand what controls and maintains the microbes’ novel traits.

It’s like a Trojan horse on an incredibly small scale, a vehicle designed to slip through the tough defensive wall of plant cells and deliver the potent gene editing system, CRISPR-Cas9. Once inside, CRISPR- Cas9 can snip out a targeted gene to boost crop yields. The delivery vehicles are nanotubes, developed by Markita Landry. With support as a Bakar Fellow, Landry is now refining the technique and working with experts in agricultural science, business and other fields needed to reach the marketplace.

Healthcare workers across the globe are facing dire shortages of critical equipment needed to treat the coronavirus. Each day, news outlets show images of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals struggling with inadequate or non-existent PPE (personal protective equipment). The public is left at home wondering what can be done to help.

The University of California, Berkeley, one of the world’s premier public universities and worldwide center for innovation, is taking a leading role in response to the COVID-19 health crisis and is convening industry and its vast internal expertise to launch real time initiatives to help firms accelerate and adapt to the new environment. With its new COVID-RX initiative, the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) will be conducting targeted projects in partnership with leading companies to focus on adapting and innovating under adversity.

UC Berkeley is not just one of the best research universities in the world, but also a unique place for entrepreneurs, students and alumni to grow and build their own innovative startups. Many of the ideas are based on issues young entrepreneurs first encountered in Berkeley classes or labs. Examples of which were presented at Berkeley SkyDeck’s annual Demo Day, where entrepreneurs pitched new devices, apps or inventions that, they hope, will provide big, bold fixes to the world’s problems, from climate change to disease.

As a neurologist, Robert Knight has seen what happens when the brain crashes around violently inside the skull. And he’s aware of the often tragic consequences. So, Knight invented a better helmet — one with more effective padding to dampen the effects of a direct hit, but more importantly, an innovative outer shell that rotates to absorb twisting forces that today’s helmets don’t protect against.

The federal government has given the University of California a New Year’s Eve gift — its 20th U.S. patent on CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technologies. The addition expands a broad patent portfolio that is already being used to improve human and animal health and crop breeding.

Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s flagship startup incubator, will be sending to Sacramento seven of the startups it has graduated in a first-of-its-kind municipal partnership.

An affordable, human-friendly robot developed by Berkeley engineers is among Popular Science’s “Best of What’s New” innovations for 2019.

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a new CRISPR-Cas9 patent to the University of California, University of Vienna and Emmanuelle Charpentier covering new methods of gene editing in prokaryotic cells. The new patent covers methods of targeting and binding or methods of cleaving a target DNA in a prokaryotic cell using Cas9 protein and single molecule DNA targeting RNAs. This patent specifically covers these methods in bacterial cells.