Berkeley nominated its Best Startup. We're already investors.
On August 5, UC Berkeley announced its nominees for the inaugural UC Regents Innovation Awards. Five names went forward, one for each category, chosen to represent the entire campus.
For Best Startup, Berkeley put forward ResVita Bio, co-founded by Professor Jay Keasling and Amin Zargar.
ResVita Bio is a California Innovation Fund portfolio company. We are, to put it mildly, not neutral here. But set our position aside for a moment, the interesting part is what this nomination says about where university science is going.
What ResVita actually does
Most drug delivery is a scheduling problem. You take a pill, the concentration spikes, it decays, you take another one. For a chronic skin disease, that means a lifetime of creams applied to a body that never stops needing them.
ResVita's approach is to stop delivering the drug and start growing it where it is needed.
The company engineers bacteria that already live on human skin so that they continuously produce therapeutic proteins right at the surface. The bacteria take sugars from an ordinary-looking lotion and convert them into medicine, on site, around the clock. The company calls the category topilogics, for topical biologics. It is a genuinely new shape of treatment, and it came out of work Amin Zargar did as a postdoc in the Keasling lab.
The lead indication is Netherton syndrome, a rare and severe genetic skin disorder. It is exactly the kind of disease that has been economically stranded for decades: too rare to attract a conventional pharma program, too devastating to leave alone.
The road to the clinic
The preclinical work is finished. ResVita is preparing to treat its first Netherton patients early next year, which would make it the first company out of Bakar Labs to reach patients.
That is the sentence to sit with. Bakar Labs opened in 2021. Getting from a postdoc's bench project to a human being inside five years is not the normal pace of university biotech, and most lab ideas never make the trip at all. An engineered live-bacterial therapeutic is a harder version of that trip than most, because it is a genuinely new kind of medicine rather than a new molecule in a familiar format.
That is not a nomination-worthy story because it is charming. It is nomination-worthy because it is hard.
Why Berkeley keeps producing these
The other four Berkeley nominees are worth naming, because together they draw a picture:
Gamechanger — Fyodor Urnov
Disruptive Research — Markita Landry
Best Startup — Jay Keasling, ResVita Bio
Community Changemaker — Elizabeth Redman Cleveland
Distinguished Lifetime Achievement — Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli
Genome editing, nanoscale biosensing, synthetic biology, community impact, and the foundations of modern chip design. That is not a list of five lucky breaks. It is what a public research university looks like when it has been compounding for a century and has finally built the connective tissue, labs like Bakar and IGI and the Berkeley Startup Cluster, to move discoveries out of the building.
We have written before about why deep tech keeps coming out of universities, and why Berkeley in particular keeps out-founding schools with far more money around them. ResVita is that thesis with a face on it: a postdoc's project, a professor who has done this before, an incubator two blocks from the lab, and a company that is now within months of treating its first patients.
Our disclosure, plainly
California Innovation Fund is an investor in ResVita Bio. We backed the company because this technology has great opportunity to save lives, help those suffering, and also has a strong market opportunity. We met with Amin, know Jay, and know that those two are both tremendously intelligent and diligent individuals. The science is an elegant solution to an age old problem that can create real breakthroughs and in less time. The principle of ”Go beyond yourself” - yep, that’s what they’re doing.
The Regents Innovation Awards are new this year, and nominees have now come in from all ten UC campuses. Winners have not been announced. ResVita is Berkeley's pick, which is its own kind of honor, and we would rather say that accurately than round it up.
Congratulations to Jay Keasling, Amin Zargar, and the entire ResVita team. Go Bears.
