Nosis Bio is a recipient of the second Golden Ticket Award at Bakar Labs, sponsored by the AbbVie

Nosis Bio, Radar Tx, ResVita Bio Win Golden Tickets to Bakar Labs, in Collaboration With AbbVie

Congratulations to Nosis Bio, Radar Therapeutics, and ResVita Bio, who won Golden Tickets to Bakar Labs yesterday! The awards grant the companies access to free lab space and facilities for a year. The opportunity will give the three companies a substantial head start in commercializing their technologies.

Nosis and ResVita were already Bakar Labs tenants, but will benefit from the prize and look forward to making the most of the warm introduction to AbbVie.

Radar is a truly early-stage company—it is not even incorporated yet! “Berkeley is the place we want to form the company,” said Radar co-founder Eerik Kaseniit, who accepted the award from Bakar Labs director Dave Schaffer. “There’s lots of amazing people. The collaborative energized environment is what we’re looking for, being on a university campus close to all these other biotechs.”

Golden Ticket winners enjoy an exceptional environment where they can access resources on the Berkeley campus, interact with our industry partners and affiliates, and connect with up to 50 fellow tenant startups. Our UC Berkeley-based incubator offers more than 20,000 square feet of premium experimental space for R&D on advanced biological and chemical technologies.

Why three awards, when only two were initially planned? The companies were selected by a panel of judges, first from a wide initial field, and then in a live pitch session at Bakar Labs. The judging panel deadlocked on the top three finalists and ultimately decided all were deserving of the award.

“We are proud to provide the facilities and ecosystem connections that will catalyze the development of these startups,” said Gino Segrè, managing director at Bakar Labs. “Nosis, Radar, and ResVita have a home where they can advance their remarkable technologies in the lab, amidst a supportive community of entrepreneurs, and in the boardroom, with the connections we offer to our industry partners and the greater ecosystem. We are delighted to be able to support their growth and progress in addressing major health challenges.”

The award program, held in collaboration with AbbVie, was open to early-stage companies developing novel, transformational therapies for immunology, oncology, neuroscience, eye care and aesthetics, or breakthrough platforms and technologies, including gene therapy, novel cell therapy, gene editing, or drug discovery technologies.

Radar is creating a new class of therapies that go after pathogenic cells based on their transcriptional signatures. This is powered by exciting RNA sensing tech from Stanford and Duke that allows for unprecedented precision in cell type and state targeting. As a platform, they are starting with oncology indications.

“We are still getting started,” Eerik said. “Having this helps us get everything off the ground. We’re teeing stuff up and when January comes round, we’ll hit the ground running. Having lab space secured makes us breathe a little easier.”

ResVita Bio seeks to restore and maintain the vitality of the skin through engineered skin probiotics. Through synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, they are developing a safe and versatile skin microbial platform that continuously deliver therapies that address the causes of chronic skin diseases and aging.

“We’re thrilled to win this award,” said ResVita founder and CEO Amin Zargar. “AbbVie is a leader in the therapeutics space, particularly immunology, and we’re looking forward to collaborative interactions as we look to develop transformational therapies in the skin disease field.”

Nosis is a seed-stage computational biotech focused on addressing the significant unmet need for better cell targered delivery of therapeutic cargos. Nosis uses state of the art deep learning & a proprietary high-throughput screening workflow to rapidly generate and validate large directed libraries of cell-targeting delivery vehicles.

For more information about the Bakar Labs Golden Ticket program, contact Gino Segrè at ginosegre@berkeley.edu.