Paul Roben, the new Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Commercialization in the Office of Research Affairs at UC San Diego, intends to “drive innovation across all areas of campus, and to speed university innovations to markets in California, the nation, and the world.”
Watergate, the botched burglary and subsequent high-level cover-up that paved the way to President Nixon’s resignation, happened more than 40 years ago. With the 2005 disclosure of FBI official Mark Felt as “Deep Throat,” the news source who leaked key details about the break-in, the last chapter on Watergate had been written, or so it seemed.
In just the past few years, researchers have found a way to use a naturally occurring bacterial system known as CRISPR/Cas9 to inactivate or correct specific genes in any organism. CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing activity runs continuously, though, leading to risk of additional editing at unwanted sites. Now, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, Ludwig Cancer Research and Isis Pharmaceuticals demonstrate a commercially feasible way to use RNA to turn the CRISPR-Cas9 system on and off as desired — permanently editing a gene, but only temporarily activating CRISPR-Cas9.
Christopher J. Kane, M.D., a renowned specialist in prostate cancer and an expert in robotic and other minimally invasive procedures for urologic surgery at the University of California, San Diego, has been appointed the inaugural holder of the Joseph D. Schmidt, MD Presidential Chair in Urology in the School of Medicine.
Just six months after coming online, Comet, the new petascale supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, is already blazing new paths of discovery, thanks in part to its role as a primary resource for an assortment of science gateways that provide scientists across many research domains with easy access to its computing power.
A new proof-of-concept funding competition will pit UC San Diego undergraduate research teams against each other to develop projects or products with commercial potential. It’s part of a renewed campus focus on innovation, entrepreneurism, and moving university problem-solving ideas into the marketplace.
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