Instead of leaving medical research up to Pharma giants, UC Berkeley has created academic routes for faculty to throw their hat into the ring. Typically, the road to getting novel treatments to the public is riddled with challenges, both scientific and financial, which can skyrocket and stand in the way of novel, lifesaving technologies. To break these barriers, UC Berkeley funds the Bakar Fellows Program, which rewards faculty who aim to make a “tangible, positive societal impact through commercialization.” The award has a proven track record of streamlining startup creation and bringing innovative approaches to the real world.

One such Berkeley faculty member is Dr. Daniel Fletcher, who has won the Bakar Fellows Award twice: once in 2017 and again in 2025, this time in partnership with the Ott lab at UCSF. Currently the Purnendu Chatterjee Chair in Engineering Biological Systems within the Department of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley, Dr. Fletcher’s research focuses on improving our understanding of how we diagnose and understand diseases on a cellular level. The team won the Bakar Fellows Award in 2017 for their project developing a mobile phone-based ophthalmoscope to easily detect retinal disease, but their most recent work in advancing novel methods for breast cancer detection is what led to the second prize.

The Fletcher lab’s work is centered on a particular form of ribonucleic acid (RNA): microRNA (miRNA). Full-length RNA comes in many different forms, such as the famous messenger RNA (mRNA), which gives the instructions for how proteins are built in cells. miRNA is to mRNA as a jury is to a criminal case: it can declare an mRNA as “guilty,” marking the strand for destruction, or as “innocent,” allowing the mRNA to continue in protein synthesis. Therefore, abnormal amounts of miRNA can indicate something is amiss.

Quantifying miRNA as a way to test for diseases has great promise, but it is currently a costly, error-prone, and complex process. “That challenge is attractive,” explains Dr. Fletcher. “There’s a possibility that these miRNAs could be useful tools for early diagnosis of a range of different diseases, one being breast cancer.” This led Dr. Fletcher and graduate students Joana Cabrera and Amanda Meriwether to investigate new ways of detecting and quantifying miRNA in tissue samples. Currently, the amount of miRNA present has to be quantified by making copies of the original miRNA strands present in a tissue sample, analogous to a jury’s verdict being communicated by word-of-mouth repeatedly. As the news is spread from person to person, small inconsistencies may arise, leading to incorrect knowledge of what the jury decided—or, in the case of miRNA levels, a significantly inaccurate quantification and the difference between diagnosing a patient as healthy or unhealthy.

The lab has managed to bypass the middlemen by using an enzyme called CRISPR-Cas13a. They developed a method to successfully engineer CRISPR-Cas13a to detect disease-specific miRNA present in human samples. A molecular guide on CRISPR-Cas13a allows it to bind a specific miRNA, at which point it generates a fluorescent signal that can be easily used to quantify miRNA. The judge now has a press secretary announcing the verdict directly to the public, leaving no room for various interpretations and errors. Prior to the lab’s efforts in miRNA quantification, CRISPR-Cas13a could not activate when targeted to small fragments of RNA. The Fletcher lab successfully re-engineered the “guide” portion of the CRISPR-Cas13a machinery responsible for miRNA recognition. With this optimized tool, the team has shown that this method could detect synthetic miRNA associated with breast cancer at concentrations that were clinically relevant.

By comparing a patient’s miRNA levels to typical levels, a definite diagnosis could be reached more easily, leading to therapies better suited for the patient. Here enters the Ott lab at UCSF, who are providing the Fletcher team a way to test their methods on real tissue banks for breast cancer. “This is just a beautiful alternative to other archaic ways of diagnosing,” says Joana Cabrera, who hopes that “unnecessarily complex and invasive tests, like mammograms and laparoscopy,” may be replaced by these new methods. “How do we make sure that we catch things as early as possible? By making easy testing part of our daily, weekly, annual lives,” says Dr. Fletcher. “I still hear cases where a young woman comes in with stage 4 breast cancer and probably all the miRNA targets were there, but they just weren’t tested.” The team hopes to validate customizable diagnostic signatures and assays, eventually having dedicated devices to analyze these tests across different healthcare settings.

“How do we make sure that we catch things as early as possible? By making easy testing part of our daily, weekly, annual lives.”

If not for the Bakar Fellows Program, many of these research endeavors at the intersection between academia and industry would never see the light of day. Drug and diagnostics development is a costly process, reflected in exorbitant pricing and lack of accessibility of many state-of-the-art drugs and detection methods. Yet, UC Berkeley is finding ways to help it thrive, especially by funding projects like Dr. Fletcher’s, whose goal of making accessible diagnostic tools has the promise of expanding coverage to those who might otherwise fall through the cracks.