In a discovery that could hasten treatment for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), UC San Francisco scientists have discovered a harbinger in the blood of some people who later went on to develop the disease.
Bruce Ovbiagele, MD, MSC, MAS, MBA, MLS, FAAN, UC San Francisco Professor of Neurology and Associate Dean of the San Francisco VA Healthcare System, has been chosen by the American Brain Foundation (ABF) to receive its annual Scientific Breakthrough Award.
UCSF Health has named Nicholas Holmes, MD, MBA, as the new president of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and senior vice president of UCSF Health Children’s Services.
Andrea V. Jackson, MD, MAS, a highly regarded obstetrician, gynecologist and diversity champion, will draw on her experience in women’s reproductive health, training the next generation of caregivers and addressing systemic racism in her role as chair of UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences.
A team of researchers from UC San Francisco has found that Paxlovid (Nirmatrelvir-ritonavir) did not reduce the risk of developing long COVID for vaccinated, non-hospitalized individuals during their first COVID-19 infection.
C. Benjamin Ma, MD, a highly regarded orthopaedic surgeon and advanced imaging researcher, has been appointed as chair of the UCSF Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. Ma will assume his new role on January 1, 2024.
The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has elected Eric J. Small, MD, FASCO, to serve as its president for the term beginning in June 2025. A long-time ASCO member and volunteer, Small will take office as president-elect immediately following the ASCO Annual Business Meeting in Chicago on June 3.
In a study publishing December 7, 2023 in JAMA Oncology, UC San Francisco researchers found that regular screening is not always sufficient to prevent an advanced breast cancer diagnosis.
When you eagerly dig into a long-awaited dinner, signals from your stomach to your brain keep you from eating so much you’ll regret it – or so it’s been thought. That theory had never really been directly tested until a team of scientists at UC San Francisco recently took up the question.
Multiple sclerosis patients whose blood tests reveal elevated NfL, a biomarker of nerve damage, could see worsening disability one to two years later, according to a new study spearheaded by researchers at UC San Francisco.
Chronic inflammation of the skin, or Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS), disproportionately affects women and people of color. It can be debilitating, negatively impacting suffers’ quality of life, physical function, work productivity, and the social and emotional wellbeing.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved palovarotene (Sohonos) as the first treatment for fibrodysplasia ossifcans progressiva (FOP), a severely disabling condition that causes abnormal bone formation in place of soft and connective tissues.
UCSF Health has performed 150 robotic focal high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) procedures for patients living with prostate cancer, becoming the first on the west coast and the first UC Health System to reach that milestone.
Benjamin N. Breyer, MD, MAS, FACS, a renowned leader in urology and urological surgery, has been appointed chair of the UCSF Department of Urology. Breyer is a urologic surgeon who is internationally known for performing complex urethral and penile reconstruction for urethra stricture and cosmetic disfigurement, male incontinence, male fistula, and surgery for erectile dysfunction.
In a study publishing Aug. 1, 2023, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the research team found that half of the participants with extensive tobacco exposure have a high level of ongoing respiratory symptoms, including shortness of breath, daily cough and phlegm, and decreased ability to exercise, but perform well in the breathing tests used to diagnose COPD.
People who contract COVID-19 but never develop symptoms – the so-called super dodgers – may have a genetic ace up their sleeve. They’re more than twice as likely as those who become symptomatic to carry a specific gene variation that helps them obliterate the virus, according to a new study led by UC San Francisco researchers.
UC San Francisco Medical Center (UCSF) is among the first four hospitals in the U.S. to be verified as part of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Vascular Verification Program (Vascular-VP), a quality program recently launched in partnership with the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS).
UCSF researchers have found that aggressive blood pressure control can lower the risk of left ventricular conduction disease, a common heart condition that often leads to pacemaker implantation.
Alka M. Kanaya, MD, UC San Francisco primary care physician and researcher, is being recognized with the 2023 Kelly West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology from the American Diabetes Association (ADA). The award recognizes significant contributions to the field of diabetes epidemiology.
Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, has been appointed chief of the newly created Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation (DoC-IT) at UC San Francisco.
The accuracy of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer can be improved by accounting for genetic factors that cause changes in PSA levels that are not associated with cancer, according to a multi-center study led by UC San Francisco and Stanford University, publishing June 1 in Nature Medicine.
In a study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a team of researchers from UC San Francisco found that lower than expected exercise capacity was common among people with Long COVID and chronotropic incompetence (inadequate heart rate increase during exercise) was the most common reason. They also found reduced exercise capacity to be correlated with early post-Covid elevations of inflammatory biomarkers. In addition, they found that reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) may be related to reduced heart rate while exercising.
In a study publishing May 10 in JAMA Cardiology, senior author and UCSF cardiologist Geoff Tison, MD, MPH, and first author Robert Avram, MD, of the Montreal Heart Institute, set out to determine whether deep neural networks (DNNs), a category of AI algorithm, could be used to predict cardiac pump (contractile) function from standard angiogram videos. They developed and tested a DNN called CathEF, to estimate LVEF from coronary angiograms of the left side of the heart.
Left ventricular conduction disease occurs when there is an electrical blockage of the heart’s normal electrical conduction system. Treatment to lessen its effects involves implanting a permanent pacemaker, but there have been no proven preventive strategies for this condition. In a study publishing May 3, 2023 in JAMA Cardiology, first author Emilie Frimodt-Møller, MD, and senior author Gregory Marcus, MD, MAS, found that intensive BP control is associated with lower risk of left ventricular conduction disease, indicating left ventricular conduction disease may be preventable.
UCSF Health’s surgical oncology team is a Bay Area leader in an innovative chemotherapy infusion pump used to treat patients with widely metastatic colorectal and bile duct cancers that have spread to the liver and are no longer considered operable.
UC San Francisco interventional cardiologists and interventional echocardiographers recently performed two novel minimally invasive cardiac procedures for the first time in the health system.
Jon Kleen, MD, PhD, UC San Francisco neurologist, epileptologist and neuroscientist, has been chosen by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) to receive its 2023 Dreifuss-Penry Epilepsy Award. He is being honored for his outstanding contributions in clinical research and leadership in the treatment of epilepsy.
No one can blame parents for being spooked by new research finding that tweens’ risk of suicidal behavior increases with their amount of screen time. However, lead researcher Jason Nagata, MD, of UCSF Benioff Children Hospitals, says that caregivers should view these findings mostly as a reminder to ingrain healthy screen use habits in their kids as early as possible.
UCSF Health has named Cynthia Barginere, DNP, RN, FACHE as senior vice president and president of adult services for UCSF Health, and Timothy Y. Kan, MBA as senior vice president and chief strategy officer. Barginere and Kan will fulfill key roles in expanding patient access to UCSF Health’s world class care.
Recent advances in newborn heart surgery have greatly reduced brain injuries in infants with congenital heart disease, according to a 20-year study by scientists at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and British Columbia Children’s Hospital (BCCH).
UC San Francisco researchers have uncovered a surprising role for fibroblasts in the lungs in activating T cell inflammation that drives lung destruction in COPD exacerbation triggered by viral infection. They also identified a T cell subset that can be targeted to treat COPD exacerbations.
Breast cancer is now the leading cause of global cancer incidence among women but determining who will develop breast cancer is still a challenge for the medical community. A new tool, developed by researchers from UCSF and several other medical institutions, helps to calculate risk for those who may develop advanced breast cancer that goes undiagnosed despite regular screenings.
UCSF researchers systematically tested CSF1R inhibition using multiple drug analogs at several time points in transgenic mice developing spontaneous tauopathy. The researchers demonstrated a reduction of tau pathology in multiple dosing schemes without complete microglial ablation.
In a study published December 8, 2022 in Science, UCSF researchers Kevin Lou, an MD-PhD student, Luke Gilbert, PhD, and Kevan Shokat, PhD, reveal the discovery of a cellular uptake pathway important for larger molecules. These large and complex molecules bind in unconventional ways to their targets, are efficiently taken up by target cells, and can be harnessed to create new drugs for the treatment of cancer and other diseases.
In a study publishing December 20 in Nature Cancer, UCSF researchers found that phenotype switching, as opposed to genetic evolution, may be the escape mechanism that explains the failure of precision therapies to date. They found that some cells shift to a mesenchymal, radiation-resistant phenotype (state) as a stress response following standard therapy.
UC San Francisco surgeons have performed the health system’s 20,000th solid organ transplant, making it just the third in the nation to reach that milestone. The surgery also marked UCSF Health’s first donation after circulatory death (DCD) heart transplant, a procedure performed by only about twenty health systems in the U.S.
Alan P. Venook, MD, a renowned expert in colorectal and liver cancers, has been announced as one of the winners of the 2022 Luminary Awards in Gastrointestinal (GI) Cancers. Venook is being recognized for his achievements in the clinical practice and research of gastrointestinal cancers.
In the past several years, myocarditis has been of public interest because of cases associated with vaccines for SARS-CoV2 or related conditions. Another form of myocarditis has been linked to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) used in cancer care. ICI-induced myocarditis is a potentially fatal side effect of ICI usage, and it appears that the adverse cardiac effects may disproportionally impact female patients. This finding is in contrast to other forms of myocarditis, with more cases reported in male patients.
The UCSF Hypoxia Laboratory and UCSF Center for Health Equity in Surgery and Anesthesia (CHESA) are formally launching the Open Oximetry Project, a multi-year initiative to improve access to safe pulse oximeters worldwide, by sharing data and creating new standards and technologies for oximeter validation that better account for skin color.
Gastrointestinal surgeons at UC San Francisco have performed the first pure robotically assisted Whipple surgery in San Francisco. The surgery was recently performed on a 77-year-old pancreatic cancer patient by surgeons Mohamed Adam, MD, and Adnan Alseidi, MD, MEd, FACS.
Ophthalmologists may be able to safely cut back on having anesthesiologists or nurse anesthetists routinely at bedside during cataract surgery, which accounts for more than two million surgeries per year in the U.S., according to a study publishing Oct. 3 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
UCSF Health’s Heart and Vascular Center is welcoming Sammy Elmariah, MD, MPH, FACC, FAHA, FSCAI, as chief of its division of Interventional Cardiology and medical director of the division’s cardiac catheterization lab. Elmariah is a recognized expert in structural heart disease interventions and catheter-based valve therapies.
In a study publishing in Nature Medicine on September 22, 2022, University of California San Francisco researchers Adam Staffaroni, PhD, and Adam Boxer, MD, PhD, combined and harmonized clinical, neuroimaging, and fluid biomarkers from nearly all familial FTD clinical research participants across North America and Europe. With that data, they developed models of clinical and biomarker dynamics to determine the temporal sequence of biomarker and clinical changes in f-FTD before disease progression begins.
UCSF Health is recruiting patients for the only FDA-approved study of the use of single port robotic technology for colorectal surgery in the United States. UC San Francisco clinical investigators Ankit Sarin, MD, FACS, and Hueylan Chern, MD, initiated the study which will evaluate whether single port robot technology is more advantageous than the current multi-port technology used in colorectal surgery.
Step counts—a measure of physical activity—were markedly lower early in the COVID-19 pandemic than pre-pandemic and remained lower, on average, in the two years following the onset of the global pandemic.
A UC San Francisco-led team of international researchers has outlined the comprehensive immune landscape and microbiome of pancreatic cysts as they progress from benign cysts to pancreatic cancer. Their findings, publishing August 31 in Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, could reveal the mechanism of neoplastic progression and provide targets for immunotherapy to inhibit progression or treat invasive disease.
When our eyes move during REM sleep, we’re gazing at things in the dream world our brains have created, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco. The findings shed light not only into how we dream, but also into how our imaginations work.