Clinical Innovation Incubator Program Workshop Series Overview Generating Innovation Highlights & Past Winners Clinical Innovation Incubator Program Home Research Research: Clinical Departments Dermatology: Home Dermatology: Research Dermatology: Research > Clinical Innovation Incubator Program Promoting Curiosity, Experimentation & Collaboration UC Irvine Dermatology, UC Irvine School of Medicine, UCI Health and Beall Applied Innovation launched a new initiative in 2024 to foster collaborations between clinicians, basic scientists and engineers to develop innovative solutions for clinical needs. The initiative offers $50,000 awards to two teams to develop their ideas. Clinicians are invited to bring their ideas for unmet needs in patient care and collaborate with basic scientists and engineers at UC Irvine, with guidance from industry mentors, to create solutions to address these challenges. Workshop Series Overview Understand the flow of the Workshop Series—from initial challenge submission to solution pitch day. View Series Details Generating Innovation Discover how the first-ever Clinical Innovation Incubator brought bold ideas to life, featuring standout proposals, winning teams and the collaborative spirit that launched it all. More about the program Workshop Series Highlights & Past Winners See how teams turned clinical challenges into real-world solutions and meet the innovators who earned $50K in funding through the Clinical Innovation Incubator Program. Explore the Inaugural Workshop Congratulations to our 2025 Program Winners We’re excited to announce that Department of Dermatology PGY-4 resident Sidharth Chand, MD, and Associate Clinical Professor Melissa Shive, MD, MPH, have been selected as the 2025 Clinical Innovation Incubator Program Awardees. During the program’s three-part workshop series, both Chand and Shive pitched a dermatology-related clinical problem and presented how they would address it through innovative research. They received $50,000 each in funding to support further development of their research. Read the news story to learn more about their research projects. Read Story Innovation in Action A UC Irvine Department of Dermatology research team, led by Professor Anand Ganesan, MD, PhD, has made a groundbreaking discovery that can potentially transform treatment for aggressive cancers and chronic skin conditions. The research team, which was supported in part by the UC Irvine Clinical Innovation Incubator program, targeted key molecular switches such as CDC42 and RhoJ to identify a new class of drug compounds that effectively block abnormal blood vessel growth (angiogenesis) in tumors and skin tissue. These findings open the door to safer, more precise therapies for conditions like melanoma and rosacea and exemplify our department’s commitment to driving translational research to impact patient care directly.