Herding catalysts at UCSF

AstraZeneca plc has a burgeoning network of public-private partnerships, but until now the pharma has lacked a presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the U.S.'s major hubs of life sciences innovation. AstraZeneca now has remedied that, as its MedImmune LLC biologics unit is piggybacking onto an NIH-sponsored initiative to support translational research at the University of California, San Francisco.

MedImmune will become the first industry sponsor of UCSF's Catalyst Awards, a grant program for researchers interested in translational applications of their work. The Catalyst Awards first launched in 2010 and previously were funded entirely by the NIH's Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program...