Drugs companies Bayer HealthCare and Roche have both signed three-year agreements with the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) to evaluate companies in life sciences with the aim of working together to advance early-stage technologies and therapeutics.
Venture capital firm Mission Bay Capital will provide seed funding to the selected companies.
Scientists based at Bayer’s US Science Hub and CoLaborator incubator in San Francisco’s Mission Bay will work with counterparts at QB3 and Mission Bay Capital as part of the arrangement, with the close proximity allowing the three parties to more efficiently evaluate a significant number of companies.
Mission Bay Capital, whose managing partners are QB3 director Regis Kelly and QB3 associate director Douglas Crawford and investment advisory committee includes the likes of venture capitalist Brook Byers, will fund up to $500,000 per company.
Since it was founded in 2000, QB3 has worked to spin out research from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and UCSF into standalone companies or to unite researchers with larger companies.