Across UC Berkeley, researchers have redirected their investigations to address the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. Learn about all the ways our experts are offering solutions across disciplines.
University technology transfer has made a significant contribution to fighting COVID-19 while ensuring global access (Healthcare Policy 17(4) May 2022). For example, UC Berkeley, which started incorporating global health provisions in its license agreements as early as 2003 to facilitate affordable access to its innovations in low- and middle-income countries, discovered a new implementation of CRISPR. The inclusion of global health protection terms when licensing the technology to Mammoth Biosciences led to the development of a high throughput COVID-19 test, which was granted emergency use authorization by the FDA in January 2022.
Photo courtesy of Max & Jules Photography.
The Office of Intellectual Property and Industry Research Alliances is seeking partners and resources to accelerate UC Berkeley’s extraordinary, communal efforts to understand and mitigate the impacts of the new coronavirus. Below, you'll find special licensing resources to incentivize rapid utilization of UC Berkeley technologies related to COVID-19, as well as examples of how UC Berkeley is partnering with industry to mitigate this pandemic.
Please contact IPIRA for information related to:
- Intellectual Property Licensing
- Receiving and Sending Materials and Data
- Corporate Sponsored Research
- Entrepreneurship
For campus policies and resources related to COVID-19, including health and safety information, see UC Berkeley's response to the coronavirus outbreak and find guidance on research operations and continuity planning.
SPECIAL INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSING
Non-Exclusive Royalty Free License
Industry and academia are collaborating with unprecedented urgency to develop technological solutions in the global fight against the COVID-19 outbreak. UC Berkeley has developed a non-exclusive, royalty-free license template to induce commercial investment in research, development, and commercialization of COVID-19-related life-saving therapeutics and tools.
CORPORATE PARTNERSHIPS ADDRESSING COVID-19
C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute
The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) are the headquarters of a bold research consortium established by enterprise AI software company C3.ai to leverage the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the internet of things (IoT) to transform societal-scale systems. In 2020, C3.ai DTI invested $5.4 million in 26 research projects advancing digital transformation science to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more about the C3.ai COVID-19 Data Lake, an aggregation of diverse structured and unstructured data sets. Watch for new calls for research proposals.
Laboratory for Genomics Research
The Laboratory for Genomics Research is a collaboration between GlaxoSmithKline and the Innovative Genomics Institute, bringing together academic and industrial researchers to accelerate the application of state-of-the-art CRISPR gene-editing techniques. The LGR has funded ten projects at UC Berkeley and UCSF to address COVID-19. Each Excellence in Research Award provides approximately $100,000 in seed funding.