What is CURED?
CURED brings together Berkeley scientists around a shared commitment to mechanism-first, discovery-oriented biology: the idea that understanding how diseases work at their most fundamental level is the surest path to preventing and treating them. Foundational immunology is the primary unifying scientific thread that connects this work across every pillar.
Mission Statement
The Center for Unmet, Rare, and Emerging Diseases (CURED) pursues systematic solutions for deprioritized diseases, led by immunology. Many of the world’s most devastating diseases lack cures because neither the fundamental science nor the market incentives are in place, and CURED addresses this through discovery-oriented research that yields transformative biological insights directed toward social good. Its four pillars are cancer, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, rare diseases, and infectious diseases and global health, united by the immune system’s centrality to all four: a discovery in one may unlock treatments across the others.
Billions of people suffer from diseases the medical system has deprioritized. The science is often within reach; the incentives to pursue it are not. CURED takes on this work because we believe innovation and knowledge should serve people and communities.
01
Targeting the mechanisms that many cancers share
02
Restoring immune tolerance at its source.
03
Finding the causal threads that connect thousands of conditions.
04
Advancing discovery science and scientific capacity where outbreaks begin.
These are the diseases that fall through the cracks of a system built around profit, not patients.
Berkeley was built on the conviction that knowledge should serve people, not power.
Jim Allison:
Basic T cell research led to cancer immunotherapy
Jennifer Doudna:
Curiosity about bacterial biology yielded CRISPR.
Neither was a targeted drug program,
but both reshaped modern medicine.
CURED brings that instinct to bear, directing Berkeley’s deepest scientific capabilities toward the problems that matter most
What makes Berkeley different is what makes CURED possible:
We sit outside the pharmaceutical system, which frees us to pursue diseases regardless of their commercial return, and we draw on disciplines medical schools rarely touch, from chemistry and bioengineering to public and environmental health. We bring that range of expertise to the immunological questions at the core of every pillar.
Inspired by past success
New technologies and approaches with broad impact across many diseases.
We build disruptive technologies with broad impact across many diseases, drawing on Berkeley’s history of innovations that reshaped how entire fields approach treatment.
2018
Nobel Prize · Physiology or Medicine
Pioneered approaches to harness the immune system to fight multiple forms of cancer.
2020
Nobel Prize · Chemistry
Realized that an immune system in bacteria called CRISPR could be engineered as a powerful gene editing tool.
CURED is particularly motivated by the emerging insight that the immune system plays a crucial role across all four of our pillars, including diseases once assumed to have no immune connection at all.
Discovery science with social responsibility.
CURED works to turn fundamental discoveries into cures, and to do so responsibly.
The scientists of CURED share a commitment to diseases that deserve greater attention, including those that disproportionately affect women, such as autoimmune conditions, and diseases of poverty such as tuberculosis.
Alongside its scientific mission, CURED runs education, training, and engagement programs that prepare the next generation of scientists for the health challenges ahead.
CURED draws on Berkeley’s entrepreneurial strength to move discoveries out of the laboratory and toward the people who need them.
Through partnerships with the Bakar BioEnginuity Hub, Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator, the Robinson Life Science, Business, and Entrepreneurship Program, and the broader Bay Area biotech community, CURED can translate promising science into real treatments and keep access at the center of that work, including for patients traditional pipelines tend to exclude.