US-based medical company Johnson & Johnson’s Corporate Office of Science & Technology (Cosat) has funded two research groups to help start biomedical companies at the University of California.
Cosat and the Rogers Family Foundation jointly fund the Bridging-the-Gap programme, which provides nearly $1m a year for targeted research designed to move projects further along the path to commercialization at the University.
The first project, to develop a synthetic capsule for the treatment of Type I diabetes, is directed by Shuvo Roy, associate professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
The second project is a collaboration between Scott Lokey, associate professor of chemistry at UC Santa Cruz, and Matt Jacobson, professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF, to combine computer modeling and benchtop synthesis of “cyclic peptides,” which can affect how proteins interact with each other.