On Jun. 13, 2019, the University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley collaborated with GlaxoSmithKline to form the Laboratory for Genomic Research (LGR), which will use CRISPR technologies to explore how genes cause disease and to rapidly accelerate the discovery of new medicines.

Known as the Laboratory for Genomic Research (LGR), the partnership will be headed by Dr. Hal Barron, chief scientific officer and president, R&D, at GSK; UCSF’s Jonathan Weissman, PhD, professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology, who has pioneered new applications of CRISPR for biological research; and CRISPR co-inventor Jennifer Doudna, PhD, professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology at UC Berkeley.

The new lab will be housed on Illinois Street adjacent to UCSF’s Mission Bay campus. Once fully established, it will provide facilities for 24 University employees funded by GSK as well as up to 14 GSK employees, with a focus on immunology, neuroscience, and oncology. GSK’s machine learning group will build computational pipelines to analyze the extensive data the LGR will produce.