• Research
• June 27, 2011

Smarter Drug Delivery with Tejal Desai, PhD

<p>Swallowing pills means medication must face the challenge of surviving the harsh environment of the digestive tract. As a result, people must take larger doses than they need. Using micro and nano-fabrication techniques developed by the computer chip industry, Desai’s lab is creating tiny devices that take multiple drugs directly to where they are needed, using less medication, minimizing side effects and making the process safer for the patient.&nbsp;</p>

• Research
• June 27, 2011

New Life for Damaged Nerves with Hubert Kim, MD, PhD

<p>Each year, scores of soldiers wounded by explosives suffer from debilitating nerve injuries that render their arms and legs useless. Kim’s research, performed at the UCSF-affiliated San Francisco Veterans Affairs hospital, has led to development of artificial nerve grafts to accelerate healing of these injuries.</p>

• Research
• June 27, 2011

Growing New Teeth with Ophir Klein, MD, PhD

<p>By understanding the underlying biological processes that allow teeth to continuously grow in rodents and other mammals, Klein’s research aims to apply those principles to regenerative medicine in humans. Klein predicts that one day patients will be able to replace their own lost teeth with living, biological replicas instead of the prosthetics oral surgeons implant today.</p>

• Research
• June 27, 2011

Mining the Human Body with Michael Fischbach, PhD

<p>Having developed an algorithm that discovered a large quantity of drug-producing bacteria in and on humans, Fischbach has turned his lab’s attention to studying their populations and interactions with each other. This, he posits, can greatly influence a person’s overall health and disease.</p>

• Research
• June 27, 2011

Rethinking Prostate Cancer with Matthew Cooperberg, MD, MPH

<p>In the era of prostate cancer screening, mortality rates have fallen 40 percent. The price of that has been over-diagnosis and over-treatment, something the current health care system cannot sustain. One of the major goals of Cooperberg’s research is to develop better risk assessment tools and instruments that can give the patient and doctor more confidence that the patient’s cancer will not progress.</p>

• Research
• June 25, 2011

Treating Disease Before Birth with Tippi MacKenzie, MD

Stem cell transplantation may hold the promise to treating many diseases before birth such as sickle cell anemia and muscular dystrophy. But first, researchers need to overcome many barriers, including rejection of stem cell transplants by the fetus. MacKenzie’s lab recently discovered that mothers’ T cells are responsible for rejecting the grafts and that this rejection may be avoided by using stem cells from the mother.

• Media Coverage
• June 21, 2011
• KPIX

Study Finds Benefits Of Sleeping On A Hammock

• Research
• June 16, 2011

Learning Lessons from an HIV Cure

<p>For doctors confronting the AIDS epidemic, past ambitions always boiled down to two main goals: prevention, or finding ways to protect people not yet exposed to HIV, through vaccines, safe sex education or other means; and treatment, or discovering effective drugs and providing them to people with HIV/AIDS, helping them live longer.</p>

• Media Coverage
• June 11, 2011
• USA Today

Sleep Might Help You Solve Problems Better

• Research
• June 8, 2011

SFGH Grand Rounds Explores Disease That First Defined AIDS

<p>Doctors and other health care professionals packed into San Francisco General Hospital’s Carr Auditorium for the June 7 medical grand rounds, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first AIDS report to the US Centers of Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention.</p>

• Research
• June 7, 2011

UCSF Finds New Bee Viruses, Offers Baseline to Study Colony Collapse

A 10-month study of healthy honey bees by UCSF scientists has identified four new viruses that infect bees, while revealing that each of the viruses or bacteria previously linked to colony collapse is present in healthy hives as well.

• Research
• June 6, 2011

UCSF Marks Three Decades of AIDS

<p>As one of the preeminent biomedical education and health sciences research institutions in the world, UCSF emerged early as a pioneer in the fight against AIDS. Today, three decades later, UCSF is working on multiple fronts to prevent, treat and stop the spread of the disease that has killed 33 million people worldwide.</p>

• Media Coverage
• June 1, 2011
• BET

The Multiple Sclerosis and Vitamin D Link

• Research
• May 27, 2011

Low Vitamin D Levels Seen as Multiple Sclerosis Risk for African Americans, UCSF Study Finds

In the first major study exploring the connection between vitamin D and multiple sclerosis in African Americans, a team of scientists at UCSF has discovered that vitamin D levels in the blood are lower in African Americans who have the disease, compared to African Americans who do not.

• Research
• May 23, 2011

UCSF Joins Caltech in Creative Problem Solving to Advance Health Care

<p>Experts at UCSF and Caltech are pushing the boundaries of creative problem solving to address important clinical problems with the hope that the talent pool at both institutions, combined with an entrepreneurial spirit, will advance health care innovation.</p>