How Can We Thwart the Next Pandemic?
Leading scientists share some of the tools and strategies that could help us better confront and contain future outbreaks.
![Illustration of three large humans standing on the Earth, pushing back coronaviruses.](/sites/default/files/styles/news_card__image/public/2021-05/thwart-next-pandemic-lessons-featured.jpg)
University of California San Francisco
Give to UCSFLeading scientists share some of the tools and strategies that could help us better confront and contain future outbreaks.
UCSF School of Nursing alum Quinn Grundy, PhD ’15, RN, shines a light on how sales reps from pharmaceutical and other health care companies skirt scrutiny, and get their products used in hospitals and doctors’ offices, by forging relationships with nurses.
Cognitive behaviorial therapy for insomnia, the gold-standard intervention, also suggests benefits for well-being.
The viruses that cause polio and COVID-19 mutate, but treatments for the diseases don’t. For over 20 years, UCSF and Gladstone Institutes scientist Leor Weinberger, PhD, has been thinking of ways to make vaccines work more efficiently by being adaptive, rather than static.
UCSF researchers wanted to see if simple tweaks, like avoiding nighttime interruptions to promote sleep, nixing certain prescription drugs, and promoting exercise and social engagement, could decrease delirium in hospitalized older adults.
Scientists now have shown that the weakening of an astronaut’s immune system during space travel is likely due in part to abnormal activation of immune cells called T regulator cells.
Researchers from the UCSF School of Nursing have joined a newly launched national collaborative to study the impacts of COVID-19 on members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer communities.
A multifaceted collaboration between researchers at UCSF, Gladstone Institutes, and other organizations across California provides a comprehensive portrait of the variant—including its interaction with the immune system and its potential to spread.
UCSF researchers have found a way to double doctors’ accuracy in detecting the vast majority of complex fetal heart defects in utero.
Sophie Dumont, winner of the 2021 Byers Award for Basic Science, focuses on finding out how, as well whether therapeutic targets exist to ensure equal – and healthy – division of chromosomes.
UCSF researchers have created a CRISPR technique to study how turning on or off single genes affects the function of different cell types and how these changes play a role in disease.
What kills most people who die from cancer is not the initial tumor. It’s the intolerable disease burden on the body that arises when tumor cells continually expand their numbers after spreading to different organs.
New research by UCSF scientists shows retinal scans can detect key changes in blood vessels that may provide an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers at UCSF have observed a new feature of neural activity in the hippocampus – the brain’s memory hub – that may explain how this vital brain region combines a diverse range of inputs into a multi-layered memories that can later be recalled.
UCSF researchers have figured out precisely what receptor tyrosine kinases are, how they form and their role in cancer.
Scientists at UCSF are learning how immune cells naturally clear the body of defunct – or senescent – cells that contribute to aging and many chronic diseases
For patients who can utilize the technology, particularly for follow-up care after a diagnosis has already been made, the benefits of telehealth are overwhelming.
Loneliness and social isolation have been significant problems for the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic, but for cancer patients these issues were particularly acute, likely due to isolation and social distancing, according to a new UCSF study.
Pioneering neural recordings in patients with Parkinson’s disease by UCSF scientists are providing the groundwork for personalized brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s and other neurological disorders.
A team at UCSF, in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University, has unearthed the regulatory DNA sequences of our archaic human ancestors in a discovery that sheds light on how we diverged from them 500,000 years ago.
Games and supplements claim to strengthen memory and cognition. Should you buy them?
Researchers at UCSF have demonstrated how to engineer smart immune cells that are effective against solid tumors, opening the door to treating a variety of cancers that have long been untouchable with immunotherapies.
A new study suggests that the dangers posed by wildfire smoke may also extend to the largest organ in the human body, and our first line of defense against outside threat: the skin.
The study is the first comprehensive review of fatalities linked to the deadly chemical in the United States and identified more deaths than previously reported.
Scientists have figured out how to modify CRISPR’s basic architecture to extend its reach beyond the genome and into what’s known as the epigenome.