Bakar BioEnginuity Hub: Berkeley’s bold new home for innovation, entrepreneurship

rendering of Bakar Labs interior

Professor Amy Herr is the Executive Director of the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub (BBH), a new campus initiative that aims to launch world-changing startups to solve pressing technical problems. BBH and it’s associated Bakar Labs incubator will open this fall in a renovated Woo Hon Fai Hall, a space where campus scholars and startup founders will work at the convergence of life and physical sciences — including engineering and data sciences — to transform academic research into viable companies that improve the world.

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Lygos working to replace polyacrylic acid with biodegradable, synthetic polymers

Non-biodegradeable, petroleum-derived, polyacrylic acid is used in everything from detergents to industrial fluids. Lygos, an alumni spinoff company that creates environmentally friendly chemicals through synthetic biology, has formed a partnership with NanoChem Solutions to produce an alternative: polyaspartate polymers. Together they will develop a process to make aspartic acid, the raw material for the polymers, from sugar via fermentation.

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Time’s Best Inventions of 2020: Pivot Bio PROVEN

photo of product packaging

PROVEN, the world’s first microbial biofertilizer for cereal crops, has been named one of the 100 Best Inventions of 2020 by Time Magazine. Developed by PivotBio, a BioE spinout company founded by Karsten Temme, PhD 2010, the product replaces synthetic solutions with nitrogen-fixing microbes, which capture nitrogen from the air and convert it into a form that plants can use.

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FDA authorizes first rapid at-home covid-19 test, made by Lucira

Lucira covid test packaging

On Tuesday the first rapid, at-home COVID-19 test was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration. The test, made by BioE-founded company Lucira, uses their loop mediated amplification reaction process, a molecular nucleic acid amplification technology, in a battery-powered standalone unit. Rather than detecting antibodies, their test is designed to detect whether an individual is shedding the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The company was developing this technology for an at-home influenza test before rapidly pivoting to address COVID-19. Lucira is led by Debkishore Mitra (PhD 2013), who founded the company with John Waldeisen (PhD 2012).

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