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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.
<p>In advance of the upcoming AIDS Walk San Francisco, UCSF will host a free public screening of a documentary depicting the emergence of the epidemic at San Francisco General Hospital and a talk by UCSF's Jay Levy, co-discoverer of HIV as the cause of AIDS, on June 29.</p>
<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>
<p>Elena Portacalone, a UCSF PhD candidate in Medical Sociology, has dedicated hours to interviewing elderly residents as part of her ethnographic fieldwork to learn more about the living conditions and quality of life this often neglected – but growing – segment of society.</p>
<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>
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.
<p>San Francisco General Hospital's internationally renowned Ward 86, one of the oldest and largest HIV/AIDS clinics in the United States, has from the start of the epidemic led efforts to understand HIV and develop treatments that make it possible for patients to manage the disease.</p>
<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>
<p>For the past 30 years, UCSF has been a leader in AIDS basic and clinical research, patient care, policy development and community and global outreach, efforts that were among the first in the nation in response to the epidemic. </p>
<p>Preventing transmission to partners or children is key to this curbing the HIV/AIDS epidemic and researchers report t exciting new tools and tactics employed in the now 30-year war against the disease.</p>
<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>
Targeting a protein that leukemia cells use to stay alive may be the key to fighting drug-resistant leukemia, a discovery that may make cancer drugs more powerful and help doctors formulate drug cocktails to cure more children of leukemia, a team led by UCSF researchers reports.
<p>Yervoy, a new cancer drug that has been approved for the treatment of late-stage melanoma – and that is being used to treat other cancers in ongoing clinical trials – is based on a strategy for boosting the immune response developed and tested by scientists from UCSF and UC Berkeley.</p>
Men and women had starkly different immune system responses to chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, with men showing no response and women showing a strong response, in two studies by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco.
<p>Scientists are making great strides in figuring out how the human brain develops, which are leading to novel ideas about the causes of a range of brain disorders, and are raising hopes for the regeneration of tissue that is lost in diseases such as Alzheimer’s. </p>
<p>One year ago today, (March 23) President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, setting in motion a series of reforms that over the course of four years will grant 32 million more Americans insurance coverage.</p>
Researchers exploring human metabolism at UCSF have uncovered a handful of chemical compounds that regulate fat storage in worms, offering a new tool for understanding obesity and finding future treatments for diseases associated with obesity.
UCSF researchers have developed a new approach to decoding the vast information embedded in an organism’s genome, while shedding light on exactly how cells interpret their genetic material to create RNA messages and launch new processes in the cell.
Low blood levels of beta-amyloid 42, a protein-like substance, were associated with the risk of significant cognitive decline within nine years in a group of elders, in a study led by Kristine Yaffe, MD, chief of geriatric psychiatry at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
UCSF researchers have tackled a decade-long scientific conundrum, and their discovery is expected to lead to significant advances in using stem cells to treat genetic diseases before birth.
African Americans, the foreign-born, and the near-poor are more likely to encounter barriers to being treated at a trauma center, according to new research reports by UCSF emergency medicine physician and researcher Renee Hsia, and her colleagues.
Cystatin C, a blood marker of kidney function, proved significantly more accurate than the standard blood marker, creatinine, in predicting serious complications of kidney disease, in a study by researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and UCSF.
Brain cancers are deadly more often than not, but UCSF researchers have determined that a particular genetic signature in is associated with longer survival, a discovery that may lead to better therapies for some of the deadliest brain cancers.
For patients with glioma, the most common primary brain tumor, new findings may explain why current therapies fail to eradicate the cancer. A UCSF-led team of scientists has identified for the first time that progenitor rather than neural stem cells underly a type of glioma called oligodendroglioma.
A team of UCSF researchers has engineered E. coli with the key molecular circuitry that will enable genetic engineers to program cells to communicate and perform computations.