University of California San Francisco
Give to UCSF
<p>Most young scientists fresh out of graduate school are content to begin a post-doctoral fellowship, working for an established faculty member. But for Christopher Allen, PhD, award-winning research in asthma meant the fast-track onto UCSF’s faculty.</p>
<p>Through the Immunological Immune Project, leading university immunologists and bioinformatics experts are probing genes to better understand how immune responses are coordinated. They aim to identify new ways to manipulate the immune system to better fight disease.</p>
As mothers have always known, a good night’s sleep is crucial to good health — and now a new study led by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at UCSF and UC Berkeley shows that poor sleep can reduce the effectiveness of vaccines.
Scientists at the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institutes participated in the national Human Microbiome Project, which used groundbreaking methods to vastly improve the understanding of bacteria that reside in and on the human body.
After being infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) in a laboratory study, rhesus macaques that had more of a certain type of immune cell in their gut than others had much lower levels of the virus in their blood, and for six months after infection were better able to control the virus.
A pioneering approach to imaging breast cancer in mice has revealed new clues about why the human immune system often fails to attack tumors and keep cancer in check. This observation, by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), may help to reveal new approaches to cancer immunotherapy.
<p>Feng-Yen Li, a PhD candidate in biomedical sciences at UCSF, is among 13 graduate students from throughout North America chosen to receive the 2012 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award.</p>
Throughout the interior spaces of humans and other warm-blooded creatures is a special type of tissue known as brown fat, which may hold the secret to diets and weight-loss programs of the future.
The immune system possesses a type of cell that can be activated by tissues within the body to remind the immune system not to attack our own molecules, cells and organs, UCSF researchers have discovered.