Tagged: Research

Adam Rao, MD/PhD student in Bioengineering, won the $50,000 Grand Prize at the 4th Surgical Innovations Shark Tank competition.

Rao, member of the Roy Lab in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, won with Tabla, a low-cost portable acoustic device for pneumonia detection.

Pharmaceutical Chemistry department members have received the following grants and fellowships between July and September 2018:

09/30/2018: Adam Renslo received the US Army Medical Research Activity Award, Department of Defense, for work on prostate cancer. This project will be funded for three years.

09/13/2018: Michelle Arkin received a one-time charitable award from the Rainwater Charitable Foundation to fund neurodegenerative research.

Inspiration can be a hard thing to find. The history of science is filled with elusive “eureka moments” taking place under unlikely circumstances—Archimedes’ jump in a bath to intuit displacement, Issac Newton’s observation of a falling apple to grasp gravity, and Nikola Tesla’s inspiration for the electric induction motor, which came as he was observing a sunset in a park and quoting Faust. In the halls of UC San Francisco, sometimes inspiration comes knocking on the door.

Michelle Arkin, PhD, has received the 2018 Breakthrough Science Initiative Award from the Ono Pharma Foundation to study a class of proteins, called 14-3-3 proteins, known to be involved in various cancers, with the ultimate goal of enabling discoveries that lead to new ways to treat cancer.

Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the U.S., trailing cancer and heart disease. Many of those errors can be traced back to issues with medications.

Cancer, fundamentally, is a problem of too much growth. For decades, health care providers have tried and failed to slow tumor growth using drugs that interfere with a particular signaling pathway, called PI3K, which is known to operate in proliferating cancer cells.

If it’s hard to take an accurate census of the 325 million people living in the US, it’s even more daunting to survey the 37.2 trillion or so cells that make up the human body. The brain alone, for instance, contains nearly 90 billion neurons, which can be classified into over a thousand distinct cell types.