News

Fri Jan 15, 2016

The UCSF Office of Diversity and Outreach (ODO) celebrated its five-year anniversary on Friday, January 15, 2016 with a ceremony at the Millberry Union Event & Meeting Center on the Parnassus campus, honoring six campus leaders who were instrumental in the development of the office.

Included among those ODO champions was UCSF School...

Thu Jan 7, 2016

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes, the Diabetes Center at UCSF, and the UCSF School of Pharmacy have converted human skin cells into fully functional pancreatic cells that produce insulin in response to changes in glucose levels. Transplanted into mice, the cells protected the animals from developing a mouse model of diabetes.

The...

Wed Dec 23, 2015

Sharon L. Youmans, PharmD, MPH, and UCSF School of Pharmacy vice dean, is the newly elected Council of Deans Secretary, American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP).

The council includes a select number of the nation’s leaders in academic pharmacy. Council activities focus on educational policies, professional program...

Tue Dec 22, 2015

Research in the lab of UCSF School of Pharmacy faculty member Nadav Ahituv, PhD, in collaboration with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and others, has identified variations at four locations in the genome underlying risk for the most common type of abdominal hernia.

The findings of this first large-scale genetic study of...

Tue Dec 22, 2015

Sepsis occurs when the body responds to an infection with a mix of tissue-damaging inflammation and anti-inflammatory responses. This biological storm can lead to acute organ dysfunction (severe sepsis) and dropping blood pressure that does not respond to intravenous fluids (septic shock).

There are more than 750,000 cases of severe...

Fri Dec 18, 2015

James Wells, PhD, whose pioneering innovations in protein engineering and technologies to identify small molecules to aid in drug discovery have yielded more than 60 patents, launched three companies, and created two UCSF technology centers, has been elected as a fellow to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

The NAI is a non-profit...

Wed Dec 16, 2015

How do you discover new drugs against diseases such as cancer?

A commonly used modern method is to screen thousands of chemical compounds against genetically identical laboratory-grown cancer cells (cell lines), then track how those compounds alter the cells’ behavior or appearance (phenotype). For example, does exposure to a compound...

Tue Dec 15, 2015

Despite Congressional mandates aimed at diversifying clinical research, little has changed in the last 30 years in both the numbers of studies that include minorities and the diversity of scientists being funded, according to a new analysis by researchers at UC San Francisco.

That lack of diversity could have a serious impact on our...

Tue Dec 8, 2015

Reprinted courtesy of UCSF Magazine.

In the pediatric bone marrow transplant clinic, pharmacist Janel Boyle’s past and present collide.

She drifts past young patients—many of them infants and toddlers—and notes their beaming smiles and balding heads. Her gaze shifts to the parents, their expressions tense but hopeful....