From Lab Bench to Bedside: Three Berkeley Scientists Nominated for Inaugural UC Regents Innovation Awards
Fyodor Urnov, Markita Landry, and Jay Keasling represent a new wave of translational biotechnology emerging from the University of California system.
Here is the English rewrite focusing exclusively on the three biotechnology nominees, structured for a science communication website. The content is reorganized and paraphrased to ensure originality while preserving all key facts.
UC Berkeley Names Three Biotech Innovators as Finalists for Inaugural UC Regents Innovation Awards
The University of California system is launching its first-ever UC Regents Innovation Awards to honor faculty who translate research into real-world impact. From UC Berkeley’s slate of five nominees, three stand out for their groundbreaking work in biotechnology, spanning gene editing, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.
These leaders exemplify the university’s strength in turning laboratory discoveries into clinical tools, agricultural advances, and new companies.
Gamechanger Award Nominee: Fyodor Urnov
Pioneering a Repeatable Blueprint for CRISPR Cures
While CRISPR gene-editing holds immense promise for curing genetic diseases, delivering these therapies to the clinic has proven slow and costly. After co-developing a custom CRISPR therapy that saved a child with a life-threatening genetic disorder, Professor Fyodor Urnov shifted his focus to making such treatments repeatable and accessible.
At the Innovative Genomics Institute, Urnov and his team created a blueprint that reduces the cost of personalized CRISPR therapies for children by 90% and shortens development timelines tenfold. This work has influenced the FDA to establish new regulatory pathways for bespoke gene editing. Urnov recently received the 2025 Catalyst Award from the American Society for Cell and Gene Therapy and now leads a multi-institutional initiative, funded by ARPA-H, to develop on-demand CRISPR therapies for infants born with rare immune diseases.
Disruptive Research Award Nominee: Markita Landry
Visualizing the Brain and Engineering Crops Without Foreign DNA
Traditional methods for studying living systems often require inserting foreign genes or expensive manipulations that can damage tissues. Professor Markita Landry is disrupting this paradigm with biotechnologies that avoid these pitfalls.
Her lab develops nanosensors that light up neuromodulators—such as dopamine and glutamate—in living human brain tissue. This allows researchers to observe how brain chemistry changes in conditions like addiction and autism without genetic alteration. In agriculture, her team edits a single fertilized plant cell to create disease-resistant varieties, introducing no foreign DNA and bypassing the years of breeding and millions of dollars typically required. This approach has already been adopted internationally and earned Landry a 2025 Guggenheim Prize and a 2026 Fulbright Fellowship.
Best Startup Award Nominee: Jay Keasling (ResVita Bio)
Engineering Skin Microbes to Produce Topical Biologics
Rare genetic and inflammatory skin disorders, such as Netherton Syndrome, are typically treated with systemic drugs that circulate throughout the entire body, causing broad side effects. Professor Jay Keasling co-founded ResVita Bio to pioneer a more targeted solution: topilogics—topical biologics for skin disease.
The challenge has been that therapeutic proteins degrade too quickly and are too expensive to deliver topically. ResVita Bio solves this by using genetically engineered bacterial cells applied to the skin. These microbes act as microscopic factories, continuously secreting therapeutic proteins locally to hit validated targets without systemic exposure. This approach combines synthetic biology with dermatology to treat diseases at their source.
Source: UC Berkeley News, August 5, 2026. Original article by Sarah Williams.
