Innovations in Human Health
Workshop: January 23, 2025
Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025
12:00 to 2:00 p.m.
Jeffery & Marsha Gibeling Conference Room 1220
Walker Hall, UC Davis
(see map)
Pizza and coffee will be served.
The first Innovator Network workshop will feature a panel of three outstanding UC Davis scientists who have launched or are on track to launch human health products:
- Dr. Carlito B. Lebrilla has channeled his mass spectrometry research into identifying biomarkers for cancer.
- Dr. Ishita Shah‘s research on antibacterial peptides in human milk in collaboration with Dr. Lebrilla and two other UC Davis professors, Dr. Bruce German and Dr. David Mills, led to them co-founding a company for bioactive milk.
- Dr. Judith Van de Water’s immunology research led to developing a detection method for autism.
We will find out what first inspired them to look for direct applications of their research, how they navigated that transition, and what advice they may have for scientists who are wondering if or how to get started as entrepreneurs.
Attendees will also learn about the available resources to support innovation on campus, and will have the opportunity to brainstorm with peers about their possible paths to entrepreneurship.
This event is intended for upper division graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff.
Meet the Panelists
Carlito B. Lebrilla, Ph.D.
Dr. Lebrilla is Distinguished Professor in the UC Davis Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine in the School of Medicine. His research is in analytical chemistry, focused on mass spectrometry with applications to clinical glycomics and biofunctional food. He has co-founded several start-ups in the areas of bioactive foods and disease biomarkers.
He has published nearly 500 peer-reviewed papers and has been selected as a Fellow of the AAAS. He has been awarded the Field and Franklin Medal for outstanding contributions to mass spectrometry, MCP Lectureship in Glycobiology, UC Davis Outstanding Researcher Award and UC Davis Innovator Award.
Ishita Shah, Ph.D.
Dr. Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Matrubials, a spin-out from the UC Davis Foods for Health Institute (FFHI), and an infectious diseases scientist by training. Matrubials develops therapies to reduce the global burden of drug-resistant infections, with women’s health as a lead indication. As the Associate Director of Microbial Programs at FFHI, she investigated the role of milk components in human health, specifically in terms of infectious diseases, which led to the founding of Matrubials.
Previously, Dr. Shah worked at Genentech and Columbia University. She received the prestigious Nat L. Sternberg Thesis Prize in 2005 for her doctoral research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
Judith Van de Water, Ph.D.
Dr. Van de Water’s laboratory has worked to successfully understand the maternal cellular immune response and the humoral immune response during pregnancy, and how dysregulation in these systems relates to neurobehavioral disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Her group discovered the role of maternal autoantibodies in the development of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which has led to the definition of a new sub-phenotype of ASD.
Dr. Van de Water has taken her work on maternal autoantibodies to found MARAbio, a UC Davis startup company. The test is currently in the commercialization stage with an assay development partner, with predicted pilot launch in 2025.