Opportunities

UCLA BIODESIGN provides advanced-degree candidates, medical residents and early-stage career professionals with a platform to innovate. The program offers interdisciplinary fellowships to train the next generation of health care transformers, connecting university resources across medicine, engineering and business with industry partners.

Discovery Track Applications open through September 30, 2022.

The UCLA Biodesign Accelerator is a forum for clinical innovators at UCLA Health to collaborate, validate, and advance early-stage ideas and concepts. 

The program offers an accelerated trajectory open to all UCLA faculty and staff (attention residents, fellows, nurses, and ancillary staff – this means you, too!). The program is an a la carte model, consisting of a time commitment of five hours per month, under the guidance of expert industry mentors, investors, and UCLA Biodesign faculty.

A partnership with Bioscience LA and UCLA Biodesign, the UCLA Health TechQuity Accelerator is a four-month program that brings front-line innovators developing inclusive technology for pandemic resilience to UCLA Health.

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) goal is to help faculty and students perform customer discovery to find out if their innovation has commercial potential. Regional NSF I-Corps Site teams complete an education component to advance to tha national NSF I-Corps program which provides funding of $50,000 to do deeper market and commercialization proof-of-concept work around the team’s technology.

The UCLA Innovation Fund is a campuswide biomedical competition to move technologies from idea to the market. Each year the program awards prizes up to $200,000 to UCLA faculty working in therapeutics, medical devices and diagnostics, and digital health technologies.

• UCLA Technology Development Group
• UCLA Health and the David Geffen School of Medicine
• UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
• UCLA School of Dentistry
• UCLA Divisions of Life Sciences and Physical Sciences

This campuswide initiative is designed to advance innovative projects into new startup companies, centers or nonprofits. The 12-week mentoring program focused on pitch development, business strategy and venture consulting.

The UCLA Technology Development Group (TDG) and David Geffen School of Medicine are continuing their partnership with the biopharmaceutical company, Sanofi, that allows UCLA faculty to participate in Sanofi's iAwards program. As described in detail in the attached Call for Proposals (CFP), successful applicants will receive $125,000 in research funding for one year, along with an opportunity to renew the support on a competitive basis or transition to a larger Sponsored Research Agreement.

The David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM) Research Themes have been charged with increasing the impact of basic, translational, clinical, and community research at UCLA in high-priority and broadly defined biomedical research areas. In addition, the Institute of Precision Health (IPH) has been aggressively building an infrastructure for collecting genetic information for a broad range of UCLA patients; IPH seeks to identify diverse research projects that either take advantage of this infrastructure or focus on the development of alternative precision health strategies for advancing knowledge and improving patient care.

The University of California Center for Accelerated Innovation offers development awards of up to $200,000 for novel technologies that address unmet needs in heart, lung and blood diseases. The funding opportunity supports a range of drugs, devices, diagnostics and tools. Faculty across the UC system are eligible to apply.

The West Coast Consortium for Technology and Innovation in Pediatrics services the Southern California community by helping innovators understand pediatric commercialization challenges early in the process and to identify viable paths to market through innovative business models and collaboration. Up to $50,000 in grant funding is available via a competitive application process.