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Radiation doses from common CT procedures vary widely and are higher than generally thought, raising concerns about increased risk for cancer, according to a new study led by UCSF imaging specialists.
UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH, will award honorary degrees to 68 former students who were interned in the United States during World War II due to their Japanese heritage. UCSF is the first public university in California to provide such degrees to former students, many of whom will be honored posthumously. Three other UC ceremonies will follow during annual commencement ceremonies on the Davis, Berkeley, and Los Angeles campuses.
The November 30, 2009 Merle Sande Memorial Lecture: “The Prehistory of HIV-1: Understanding the Primate Roots of Human AIDS" and the December 1, 2009 “Minority Stress Theory, Findings and Implications for HIV/AIDS Prevention with Racial/Ethnic Minority Gay and Bisexual Men” lecture.
The 20th annual Macy’s Tree Lighting Ceremony, benefiting UCSF Children’s Hospital. Macy’s partners with UCSF each year to raise funds for the UCSF Children’s Hospital palliative care program – Compass Care – which provides essential medical care and emotional support for families whose children have life-threatening illnesses. Over the last six years, more than $800,000 has been raised through sponsoring lights that adorn Macy’s gift to the city, an 85-foot-tall Shasta Fir tree.
A $2M gift for the new UCSF Children’s Hospital at Mission Bay was unveiled on November 19 in San Francisco during a conference hosted by the cloud computing company Salesforce.com. The gift is comprised of $1M from the Salesforce.com Foundation and a matching gift of $1M from Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and his family. The Foundation gift is part of a new initiative called Healthy Communities and honors General Colin L. Powell, USA (retired), who is a strong child advocate and friend of the Foundation.
UCSF scientists have shown for the first time that the rigidity of a tissue can induce cancer. The research team identified an enzyme that is crucial for regulating tissue stiffness and demonstrated that the enzyme can turn abnormal but non-malignant breast tissue into tumors, according to a study published in “Cell” online.
UCSF scientists studying fruit flies have uncovered a new function for a gene whose human equivalent may play a critical role in schizophrenia.
Global Health represents more than a $75 billion impact on the California economy, according to a report by the newly formed University of California Global Health Institute. The report was released today during a conference on the importance of global health to California.
UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Children’s Hospital are implementing a temporary change to their visitor policy due to a recent increase in cases of H1N1 flu and the potential for the virus to spread.
In a study of 1,200 veterans of the Vietnam war, those who reported taking a life in combat had a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, violent behaviors, trouble with daily functioning, and other psychological problems than those who did not, even decades after their war experience.
<p>In his State of the Union Address of 1971, President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. Thirty seven years later, cancer threatens to become the leading cause of death in developed nations. Some critics claim that we have literally "lost" the war on cancer. They are wrong, says UCSF's J. Michael Bishop, MD, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on cancer.</p> <p>Bishop, who stepped down as chancellor of UCSF on June 30, 2009 but remains on the UCSF faculty, discussed The Future of Cancer "<a href="http://www.jccsf.org/content_main.aspx?catid=580"><i>In Conversation</i></a>" with <i>KQED</i> radio host Michael Krasny at the Jewish Community Center on Oct. 20, 2009.</p> <p>"We have uncovered the fundamental malady that underlies cancer: malfunction of genes," says Bishop. "As a result, we are poised to attack the disease in ways that could not have been imagined thirty years ago. We can win the war on cancer: in the short term, with more effective therapies; and in the longer term, by interdicting the causes of cancer to prevent the disease.”</p> <p>Bishop, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and director of the G. W. Hooper Foundation, a biomedical research unit at UCSF, discussed the latest advances in cancer research and treatment, including the short- and long-term strategies that are emerging to combat the genetic malfunction at the root of cancer.</p>
School-based physical education plays a key role in curbing obesity and improving fitness among adolescents from low-income communities, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley.
UCSF HIV researchers have received two NIH grants of $1 million each to study the use of web-based, patient controlled personal health records to improve health and HIV prevention outcomes for HIV positive patients.
UCSF Global Health Sciences and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) will host a public forum titled, “A Center of Excellence for Global Health: Why Global Health Matters to California.” The event will focus on the future of U.S. and California leadership in global health and the release of a report on the multi-billion-dollar impact of global health on California.
In a study of 1,022 men and women with heart disease, those with post-traumatic stress disorder perceived the effects of their disease as more burdensome and disabling than did those without PTSD, even when their actual heart health was no worse by objective measures.
UCSF and the Aga Khan University signed a memorandum of understanding today to advance their common goal to promote equitable human advancement and social justice in the less privileged parts of the world.
Two teams of UCSF scientists have received grants from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to advance their stem cell based strategies for treating diabetes and brain tumors. The intent of the grants is for teams to file new drug applications to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration within four years, driving potential therapies toward clinical trials.
UCSF and the UCSF-affiliated J. David Gladstone Institutes have been named among the top 10 best places to work in U.S. academia, according to 2009 survey results announced today by “The Scientist” magazine. The magazine ranks UCSF as the second best academic work setting and the Gladstone Institutes as sixth.
The California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) is collaborating with a newly launched $7.5 million fund to provide startup capital for University of California bioscience entrepreneurs and a long-term endowment for QB3.
Philanthropists Irwin and Joan Jacobs of La Jolla, CA are giving a $6.5 million gift to UCSF for head and neck cancer research. It is believed to be the largest private, U.S. gift for research supporting this disease.
The UCSF Chief of Police will hold a media briefing regarding the vehicular death this morning of UCSF Police Officer Edson Veloro, offering comments on Detective Veloro’s outstanding service to UCSF. A limited status report will also be available on the condition of Police Dispatcher Art Dragon, who was also in the accident and was admitted to San Francisco General Hospital early this morning.
UCSF Medical Center has been named the winner of the 2009-2010 “Consumer Choice Award” for hospitals in San Francisco by the National Research Corporation, a major healthcare performance research firm. Local consumers rated UCSF as the number one choice for quality healthcare among all hospitals in San Francisco.
A study conducted by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco offers evidence that veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder have a significantly lower survival rate one year after surgery than veterans without the diagnosis, even though the veterans with PTSD were seven years younger on average.
Twenty years of screening for breast and prostate cancer – the most diagnosed cancer for women and men – have not brought the anticipated decline in deaths from these diseases, argue experts from the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in an opinion piece published in the “Journal of the American Medical Association.”
The Kaiser Permanente Research Program on Genes, Environment, and Health (RPGEH) and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have been awarded $24.8 million over two years by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a new resource for studying disease, health, and aging.
Five UCSF faculty scientists are among the 65 newly elected members to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences. Election to IOM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. The new members were announced today (Oct. 12, 2009) at the IOM annual meeting.
Presentation by Ambassador Stephen Lewis, co-director, AIDS-Free World and U.N. special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa (2001-2006), follow by panel discussion and reception. Lewis will be introduced by UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, MD, MPH.
The University of California, San Francisco has been designated to lead a new consortium that will study a group of severe immune disorders known as primary immunodeficiencies and aims to improve treatment for these often life-threatening diseases. The Primary Immune Deficiency Treatment Consortium comprises 13 centers throughout the United States and has a $6.25 million funding commitment over five years from the National Institutes of Health.