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To break these barriers, UC\nBerkeley funds the Bakar Fellows Program, which rewards faculty who aim to\nmake a “tangible, positive societal impact\nthrough commercialization.” The award\nhas a proven track record of streamlining\nstartup creation and bringing innovative\napproaches to the real world.\n\nOne such Berkeley faculty member\nis Dr. Daniel Fletcher, who has won\nthe Bakar Fellows Award twice: once\nin 2017 and again in 2025, this time in\npartnership with the Ott lab at UCSF.\nCurrently the Purnendu Chatterjee Chair\nin Engineering Biological Systems within\nthe Department of Bioengineering at UC\nBerkeley, Dr. Fletcher’s research focuses\non improving our understanding of how\nwe diagnose and understand diseases on a\ncellular level. The team won the Bakar Fellows Award in 2017 for\ntheir project developing a mobile phone-based ophthalmoscope to easily detect\nretinal disease, but their most recent work\nin advancing novel methods for breast\ncancer detection is what led to the second\nprize.\n\nThe Fletcher lab’s work is centered\non a particular form of ribonucleic acid\n(RNA): microRNA (miRNA). Full-length RNA comes in many different\nforms, such as the famous messenger\nRNA (mRNA), which gives the instructions for how proteins are built in cells.\nmiRNA is to mRNA as a jury is to a\ncriminal case: it can declare an mRNA as\n“guilty,” marking the strand for destruction, or as “innocent,” allowing the\nmRNA to continue in protein synthesis.\nTherefore, abnormal amounts of miRNA\ncan indicate something is amiss.\n\nQuantifying miRNA as a way to\ntest for diseases has great promise, but\nit is currently a costly, error-prone, and\ncomplex process. “That challenge is\nattractive,” explains Dr. Fletcher. “There’s\na possibility that these miRNAs could\nbe useful tools for early diagnosis of a\nrange of different diseases, one being\nbreast cancer.” This led Dr. Fletcher\nand graduate students Joana Cabrera\nand Amanda Meriwether to investigate\nnew ways of detecting and quantifying\nmiRNA in tissue samples. Currently,\nthe amount of miRNA present has\nto be quantified by making copies\nof the original miRNA strands\npresent in a tissue sample, analogous to\na jury’s verdict being communicated by\nword-of-mouth repeatedly. As the news\nis spread from person to person, small\ninconsistencies may arise, leading to\nincorrect knowledge of what the jury\ndecided—or, in the case of miRNA levels,\na significantly inaccurate quantification\nand the difference between diagnosing a\npatient as healthy or unhealthy.\n\nThe lab has managed to bypass the\nmiddlemen by using an enzyme called\nCRISPR-Cas13a. They developed a\nmethod to successfully engineer CRISPR-Cas13a to detect disease-specific miRNA\npresent in human samples. A molecular\nguide on CRISPR-Cas13a allows it to\nbind a specific miRNA, at which point\nit generates a fluorescent signal that can\nbe easily used to quantify miRNA. The\njudge now has a press secretary announcing the verdict directly to the public, leaving no room for various interpretations\nand errors. Prior to the lab’s efforts in\nmiRNA quantification, CRISPR-Cas13a\ncould not activate when targeted to small\nfragments of RNA. The Fletcher lab successfully re-engineered the “guide” portion of the CRISPR-Cas13a machinery\nresponsible for miRNA recognition. With\nthis optimized tool, the team has shown\nthat this method could detect synthetic\nmiRNA associated with breast cancer\nat concentrations that were clinically\nrelevant.\n\nBy comparing a patient’s miRNA\nlevels to typical levels, a definite diagnosis\ncould be reached more easily, leading to\ntherapies better suited for the patient.\nHere enters the Ott lab at UCSF, who\nare providing the Fletcher team a way to\ntest their methods on real tissue banks\nfor breast cancer. “This is just a beautiful alternative to other archaic ways of\ndiagnosing,” says Joana Cabrera, who hopes that “unnecessarily complex and\ninvasive tests, like mammograms and\nlaparoscopy,” may be replaced by these\nnew methods. “How do we make sure\nthat we catch things as early as possible?\nBy making easy testing part of our daily,\nweekly, annual lives,” says Dr. Fletcher.\n“I still hear cases where a young woman\ncomes in with stage 4 breast cancer and\nprobably all the miRNA targets were\nthere, but they just weren’t tested.” The\nteam hopes to validate customizable diagnostic signatures and assays, eventually\nhaving dedicated devices to analyze these\ntests across different healthcare settings.\n\n**“How do we make sure\nthat we catch things\nas early as possible?\nBy making easy testing part of our daily,\nweekly, annual lives.”**\n\nIf not for the Bakar Fellows Program,\nmany of these research endeavors at the\nintersection between academia and industry would never see the light of day. Drug\nand diagnostics development is a costly\nprocess, reflected in exorbitant pricing\nand lack of accessibility of many state-of-the-art drugs and detection methods.\nYet, UC Berkeley is finding ways to help\nit thrive, especially by funding projects\nlike Dr. Fletcher’s, whose goal of making\naccessible diagnostic tools has the promise\nof expanding coverage to those who might\notherwise fall through the cracks.","image":{"publicURL":"/static/73f9b2f0cda72ceaee85500490e62c98/33447cad725966164c4e66f6bad3cbe0.png"},"authors":[{"id":"6a1b3e0fa1914505ee622e72","name":"Thrisha Praveen"}],"designers":[{"id":"638c50651e0c2a0a6f33737a","name":"Sunnie Kong"}],"categories":[{"id":"6030b07d7782326a48b058bd","title":"Life Science"}],"magazine":{"id":"6a1b3daba1914505ee622e6e","title":"Spring 2026","issue":50}},"recent":{"edges":[{"node":{"id":"Article_6a1b7b70a1914505ee622e8a","title":"A quarter-century of BSR","authors":[{"id":"6930d4c5a1914505ee622e05","name":"Eleanor 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