As federal research funding faces growing uncertainty, the Molecular Therapeutics Initiative (MTI) at UC Berkeley is stepping up to support bold scientific innovation.
This week, MTI announced the recipients of its 2025 MTI Innovator Awards, honoring six scientists for their transformative approaches to therapeutic discovery. MTI was founded to reinvent drug discovery at the interface of academia and biotech, drawing on UC Berkeley’s unique strengths: a deep mechanistic understanding of disease biology, interdisciplinary collaboration across biology, chemistry, and computational science, and close ties to the biotech and venture capital sectors. By combining fundamental discoveries with translational expertise, expertise, and pressure-testing ideas with less “red tape”, MTI aims to accelerate the development of next-generation therapies for the world’s most challenging diseases.
Each Innovator Award includes $90,000 in research funding as well as customized support from MTI’s advanced drug discovery and medicinal chemistry platforms.
The 2025 MTI Innovator Awardees include:
- Prof. Liana Lareau, (Bioengineering) – developing a novel, allele-specific gene therapy for retinitis pigmentosa using CRISPR prime editing.
- Prof. Jim Hurley (MCB) – developing selective inhibitors using advanced cryo-EM-guided medicinal chemistry to create targeted therapies for tumors with specific chromosome deletions.
- Prof. Matt Welch, PhD (MCB) – identifying small molecule inhibitors of essential kinesin motor proteins in Trypanosoma brucei—the parasite that causes African sleeping sickness—using genetic validation and high-throughput chemical screening.
- Prof. Ehud Isacoff, PhD (Neuroscience) – designing a novel high-throughput FRET-based screening platform to identify modulators of glutamate receptors for the treatment of depression, enabling discovery of faster-acting, more targeted antidepressants.
- Prof. Rumi Sherriff, PhD candidate, and James Olzmann, PhD (MCB) – discovering molecular glues that restore degradation of cancer-promoting mutant proteins by enhancing their recognition, offering a precision therapeutic strategy for aggressive cancers with degron mutations.
Sherriff’s award marks a historic first for MTI: he is the first trainee to be selected for a principal investigator role. “We have been opening these awards to Grad students and postdocs, in line with our commitment to empowering the next generation of scientists”, remarks faculty director Prof. Roberto Zoncu.
The entrepreneurial spirit thrives in times of adversity
Julia Schaletzky
MTI Executive Director
Each of these researchers will receive not only funding but also access to a bespoke suite of MTI preclinical development services – including assay design, chemical screening, lead optimization, academic-industry navigation, and entrepreneurship resources. “We are excited to be able to fund so many innovative projects,” says Prof. Dan Nomura, faculty director of the MTI. “It really drives home the point of how pioneering Berkeley has been, the #1 university for startups”, executive director Dr. Schaletzky adds; “The entrepreneurial spirit thrives in times of adversity!”.
