UC San Diego Joins Innovative Genomics Institute to Advance Next-Generation Genome Editing for Health and Climate
核心洞察
UC San Diego (搜索) has become the fourth UC campus partner of the Innovative Genomics Institute (搜索), founded by Nobel laureate and CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna (搜索).
The partnership will combine UC San Diego (搜索)'s strengths in environmental science, engineering, and biomedical research with IGI's genome-editing expertise to tackle challenges in human health and climate.
Ongoing collaborations include developing jumbo phage therapies for antibiotic-resistant infections and microbiome-editing tools funded by a $70 million Audacious Project gift.
The University of California San Diego and the Innovative Genomics Institute (搜索) (IGI), founded by Nobel laureate and CRISPR gene editing co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna (搜索), announced a new partnership to jointly develop cutting-edge genomic tools for addressing large-scale challenges in health and the environment. UC San Diego (搜索) joins as the IGI's fourth UC partner campus, alongside UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UC Davis.
"I'm thrilled that the IGI is now partnering with UC San Diego (搜索)," said Doudna. "The mission of the IGI is to develop solutions that can not only scale to meet the biggest challenges in health and climate, but to make solutions that are accessible to those who need them most. UC San Diego helps us expand that real-world impact."
A Decade of Growing Collaboration
The formal partnership builds on a relationship between UC San Diego (搜索) and IGI research labs that has been developing over the past decade. For several years, the IGI has collaborated with UC San Diego researchers Joe Pogliano, professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, and Kit Pogliano, dean and professor of the School of Biological Sciences, on applied microbiology projects. These efforts, conducted alongside UC Berkeley-based Doudna, Savage, and Cress labs, have focused on developing new therapies using "jumbo phage" for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections as well as a novel defense strategy against viral infections.
"Harnessing the power of collaboration across the UC system, together with the extraordinary potential of genomic technologies, gives us an opportunity to tackle challenges in human health and the environment at a scale no single campus could achieve alone," said UC San Diego (搜索) Chancellor Pradeep Khosla.
Significant Funding and Research Momentum
In 2023, UC San Diego (搜索) researchers led by Joe Pogliano and Elizabeth Villa were awarded $10 million by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to explore the biomedical promise of jumbo phage as therapeutic agents. That same year, the IGI received a $70 million gift through the Audacious Project to develop microbiome-editing tools targeting problems caused by microbes and microbiome imbalances, including livestock methane emissions and inflammatory diseases such as asthma (搜索). Joe Pogliano has since joined this effort, working with Brady Cress to develop more efficient tools for genome editing across a wide breadth of microorganisms.
In the environmental arena, UC San Diego (搜索) researchers in the Bier and Akbari labs have worked closely with the Marshall lab at UC Berkeley since 2018 to develop tools for combatting crop pests, managing disease-carrying mosquito populations, and establishing safe protocols for environmental applications of genomic technologies.
"UC San Diego (搜索) brings exceptional strengths across biological sciences, medicine, engineering, computation, environmental research and ocean science that align powerfully with the IGI's mission," said Dean Kit Pogliano. "I am excited to help lead this campus-wide collaboration, building on years of productive partnership between UC San Diego and IGI scientists while creating new opportunities to develop genomic technologies that can move from fundamental discovery toward scalable solutions in human health, climate resilience and the environment."
Future Prospects: AI, Drug Discovery, and Climate Resilience
IGI's Executive Director Brad Ringeisen highlighted multiple areas of synergy emerging from the partnership. "UC San Diego (搜索)'s strengths in engineering, medical devices, environmental research and the microbiome complement IGI's current research areas, and allow us to expand our societal impact in new ways," said Ringeisen. "AI and machine learning are dramatically accelerating the speed of research in genomics, so we are very excited about applying the joint power of UC Berkeley and UC San Diego's computer science prowess to large problems in human health and the environment."
New joint projects of particular interest include interdisciplinary programs designed to bolster the climate resilience of oceans and soils through innovative scalable solutions, as well as combining UC Berkeley's biotechnology discovery engine with UC San Diego (搜索)'s biomedical research and health system to improve the drug discovery pipeline for rapid translation across areas such as antimicrobial resistance (搜索) and neurodegenerative disease (搜索).