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The Catalyst Program is excited to announce the recipients of the 2025 Catalyst Awards! UCSF principal investigators with promising translational projects designed for patient benefit and with commercial potential spanning therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, and digital health can apply. Awarded projects receive mentorship and advice from the Catalyst Industry Advisor network as well as seed funding for their projects.
In addition to the University of California Office of the President and UCSF Innovation Ventures, the 2025 Funding Partners include: the Weill Institute for Neurosciences, the Benioff Center for Microbiome Medicine, the Cardiovascular Research Institute, School of Pharmacy, the Quantitative Biosciences Institute, Department of Medicine, Department of Ophthalmology, and the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.
This Catalyst Award cycle was very competitive and the Catalyst Advisor Selection Committee selected the following 19 projects as the 2025 Catalyst Awardees:
Steven Altschuler, PhD, Lani Wu, PhD, and Cathy Lomen-Hoerth, MD, PhD - Beyond Genetics: A Digital Health Platform for ALS and other Complex Diseases
Mandar Aras, MD, PhD, Arun Padmanabhan, MD, PhD, and Yaser Abu-Mostafa, PhD - Automated Analysis of Echocardiographic Variables in Heart Disease
Maryam Bijanzadeh, PhD, Reza Abbasi Asl, PhD, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, and Andrew Krystal, MD - Towards Objective Depression Screening: Developing a Multimodal Brain Body Wearable Biomarker System
Frank Brodie, MD, MBA and Daniel Schwartz, MD - Vitreoretinal Adhesion Therapy to Prevent Retinal Detachment
Mauro Caffarelli, MD and Edilberto Amorim, MD - NeuroSentry: EEG Software for Non-Expert In-Hospital and Periprocedural Stroke Detection
Ritchie Chen, PhD, MSc - Targeted Gene Delivery in the Brain Using Bio-derived Lipid Nanoparticles to Treat Intractable Epilepsies
Roshanak Irannejad, PhD, Kevan Shokat, PhD, and Jeffrey Olgin, MD - Novel Approach to Inhibit Beta-Adrenergic Signaling in Diastolic Heart Dysfunction Using a Spatially Restricted Beta-Blocker
Tyson Kim, MD, PhD - Multiphoton Aqueous Flowmetry and Multimodal Glaucoma Therapy
Bin Liu, PhD, and Tom Arnold, MD - Tissue-specific Choline Transporter Antibody for GBM and AML Therapy
Susan Lynch, PhD - Preclinical Development of Protoporphyrin-Producing Escherichia Coli as a Prophylaxis for Anaphylaxis
Kristen Mengwasser, MD, PhD, and Alexander Marson, MD, PhD - B-Scan: Mapping B-Cell Receptor and Antibody Specificity using a Mammalian Genome-wide Screening Platform
Julian Motzkin, MD, PhD, and Prasad Shirvalkar, MD, PhD - Intracranial Neural Biomarkers for Chronic Primary Pain Diagnosis and Treatment Selection
Feroz Papa, MD, PhD and Bradley Backes, PhD - Kinase Inhibitors of the Unfolded Protein Response Sensor/effector IRE1alpha to Treat Type 1 Diabetes
Neel Pasricha, MD, and Onur Cil, MD, PhD - Repurposed Macropinocytosis Inhibitor Eye Drop for Antibody-Drug Conjugate (ADC) Corneal Toxicity
Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, PhD, Bruce Miller, MD, Katherine Possin, PhD, Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini, MD, PhD, Bill Seeley, MD, and Andreas Rauschecker, MD, PhD - Memory and Aging Center Co-pilot: A Multi-Agent AI System for Neurodegenerative Disease Diagnosis
Danielle Swaney, PhD, and Einar Krogsaeter, PhD - Correcting Subcellular Protein Trafficking to Treat Alzheimer’s Disease
Raymond Swanson, MD - Blocking Cytotoxicity of α-Synuclein Aggregates for the Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease
Jet Vonk, PhD and Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini, MD, PhD - A Speech-Based Algorithm for Differential Diagnosis and Longitudinal Monitoring of Dementia
John Yue, MD, Mahmoud Elguindy, MD, PhD, and Geoffrey Manley, MD, PhD - Evaluation of Blood-Based Proteomic and RNA Biomarkers to Improve Traumatic Brain Injury Diagnosis and Prognostication
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