Pelosi Announces $30.5 Million for UCSF to Research Drug Side-effect Prevention

San Francisco - Today, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi announced that the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) will receive up to $30.5 million in new federal funding for its research into preemptively identifying the side-effect targets a drug might have to design the drug to avoid them. This funding comes from the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) initiative, which was developed by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo and established by March 2022 government funding legislation that then-Speaker Pelosi led in negotiating and enacting.

"UCSF has long been a beacon of excellence in scientific research and medical treatment, especially its leadership on HIV/AIDS with Ward 86," Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said. "With this new federal funding, UCSF will be able to support the cutting-edge research of San Francisco scientists into proactively preventing side-effects for FDA-approved drug therapies. We are grateful for President Joe Biden's leadership and Congresswoman Anna Eshoo's authorship in championing the ARPA-H legislation which has offered so many families across America hope for a better future."

"The AVOID-OME project leverages high-throughput drug discovery and machine learning to flip the process of predicting adverse reactions on its head and markedly improve the time and cost involved in candidate drug discovery. This work will create a "public good" dataset and algorithm that the drug discovery community can leverage and grow to develop future drug candidates more efficiently and effectively," said Harold Collard, Vice Chancellor for Research, UCSF.

UCSF will soon be able to draw on a $30.5 million federal budget to support its "structurally enabling the 'avoid-ome' to accelerate drug discovery" project. This initiative promises a more proactive and data-driven approach that will ultimately accelerate the delivery of new drug therapies to patients.

Modeled on successful defense and energy research initiatives, ARPA-H supports break-through research efforts with the potential to improve health outcomes for those living with devastating medical conditions.