UCSF and UC Berkeley to Receive $53 Million in Funding Over the Next 10 Years
A new long-term research collaboration between the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), UC Berkeley, and the biotech giant Genentech was announced last month in San Francisco. The partnership, named the Alliance for Therapies in Neuroscience (ATN), was funded by the Weill Neurohub and is being referred to as a major milestone. ATN aims to hasten the development of therapeutics for devastating brain diseases and disorders of the central nervous system (CNS), including autism. The collaboration’s initial areas of investigation will focus on neurodegeneration, CRISPR-based therapeutics, protein degradation, functional genomics in human brain cells, and sleep mechanisms and circuits. The first projects funded under ATN will examine four key areas for neurological and psychiatric disorders: development of biomarkers to track disease progression and the effectiveness of future therapies; understanding molecular pathways of protein breakdown that drive disease; parsing genetic and protein profiles linked to CNS disorders; and developing therapeutics for brain diseases based on CRISPR technologies. The scientists and funders behind ATN are extremely optimistic about this new effort. Their main goal is to create a new generation of clinical treatments for those affected by brain diseases and CNS disorders.
