The three year agreement, with research and other support up to $9.5 million, establishes a university team to help identify promising areas of mutual interest and facilitate project management. The innovative effort already has templates in place to allow swift industry-university agreements.
The Pfizer- University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) agreement will encourage collaborations between the company and UCSF’s unit of QB3, the multi-campus California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences, headquartered at UCSF.
The effort will be managed by QB3. All interested UCSF scientists will be eligible to participate, as will scientists at QB3’s two sister university campuses – UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.
Corey Goodman, president of biotherapeutics and bioinnovation center at Pfizer, said: “The need to find better ways to bridge the gap between biomedical research and drug discovery could not be more acute. The great discoveries from basic research must be better translated to develop new medicines for unmet medical needs.”