California Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Our goal is to provide a permanent or a curative genetic solution for that, those same patient populations with that third program.

And actually, what's interesting is that both our second and our third program are funded by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Um, and this is allowing us to advance both of them quite rapidly and in parallel, which we're very excited about.

All right.

And what I mean by that is when during my initial discussions with the startup, one of the first things I'll ask him is like, okay, you want this patent, but what's the breadth of IP that you'd want to license? Because we can license data we have a committee for patient data because there's rightfully sensitivity about that but if this technology has been in the clinic and there's patient data that's available for licensing if there's underlying data protocols repositories things that can complement and actually put the position the startup in a position for success better success we want to do that because it's also win-win in terms like okay we're not just bundling a single patent we have a breadth of ip that we can work with you on to ensure the startup has it that, again, aligns with policy, procedures, protocols that we can discuss with them.

But that also allows us for UCLA to benefit for better consideration because, for instance, with the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which is state-funded, $12 billion entity, that our researchers will receive $5, $10 million to advance their technology into the clinic.

That makes it much more inherently valuable, de-risked, and puts the tech transfer office in UCLA in a better negotiating position that the startup will understand because they're in a better position having a clinical stage asset, as an example, Venom, something that's much more nascent.

Yeah.

And that helps out the entire field and the entire ecosystem.

Speaking of ecosystems, what's it like to be part of the CIRM Alpha Clinic Network? You're one of nine.

We're one of nine here at UC San Diego.

What's it like to leverage the collaboration within that network?

60 or 80% of autism intellectual disability has some genetic component, but we and others have shown there's a very strong environmental influence.

I have a very large grant from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which is funding a lot of this work now.

We're very lucky here to be in California with this $12 billion agency that was funded by our voters.

And we found, for example, air pollution can contribute.