A UC San Francisco-created, insulin-generating implant that utilizes nanotechnology is closer to becoming a real treatment for diabetes, after being acquired by a San Francisco-based startup.
The biotechnology company Encellin acquired exclusive worldwide rights to the technology, originally developed in the laboratory of Tejal Desai, PhD, chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine.
The Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences (BTS) is celebrating Hubert Sylvester on the occasion of his 35th employment anniversary at UCSF.
Before joining the staff at UCSF, Sylvester was attending college. Over the course of his UCSF career, he has served as a clerk, an assistant store keeper, a member of the purchasing staff, and now as a purchasing analyst.
Kidney failure is a debilitating and ultimately deadly illness, and a health policy crisis. With 468,000 people on dialysis in the U.S., costing the government $31 billion dollars a year, very little money is spent on researching alternatives to current treatments.
Strategic plan progress report. Research: Driving the development of innovative and precise drugs, medical devices, and diagnostic tests. Flu treatments; Tackling antimalarial resistance; Attacking hard targets; Plotting cell maps; Safer opioid pain killer; Cellular construction; New products through bioengineering; Regulatory science leadership; Tobacco burden in vulnerable populations; Economics of disease; Precision medicine.
“There are lots of important problems. Only attack those for which you can divine simple experiments with clear answers.”—Julius Axelrod
This quotation is a guiding principle for Su Guo, PhD, professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences (BTS). Her research employs the unique strengths of a simple vertebrate, the zebrafish (Danio rerio), to address a wide variety of topics related to neuroscience.
Kathy Giacomini, PhD, a leader in the field of pharmacogenomics, has been named the 2017 recipient of the North American Scientific Achievement Award, presented by the International Society for the Study of Xenobiotics (ISSX). ISSX is an international association of scientists that promotes the understanding of the interactions of medicines and chemicals with living systems.
“What makes it so special to me is that I was nominated by friends and colleagues,” Giacomini says.
The common lab practice of adding antibiotics to cell cultures to prevent contamination can actually induce genetic changes in the cells, a paper senior-authored by Nadav Ahituv, PhD, found. Ahituv is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine.
The Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences welcomes Ren Dodge as an intern in the Desai Lab.
Dodge was awarded the Strong Workforce Fellowship through the Biotechnology Program at Berkeley City College (BCC). “This is a very special opportunity to be involved with cutting-edge research at one of the world’s top research universities,” says Dodge. “I expect to learn some advanced skills which will help further my career in research.”
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) has awarded the UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences (BTS) and the UCSF Department of Surgery a five-year interdisciplinary R25 research education grant for its Biodevice Innovation Training Program.
The UCSF School of Pharmacy conferred the doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) degree on 120 graduates at its 2017 commencement on May 19 at Louise Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.
Dean B. Joseph Guglielmo, PharmD, addressed a gathering that included more than 1,000 of the graduates’ family, friends, and colleagues, as well as School faculty members and special guests. In his remarks, he celebrated the graduates’ diversity, breadth of experience, empathy, and perseverance.
Professor and department chair Tejal Desai, PhD, had the honor of keynoting the 2017 Bioengineering High School Competition (BioEHSC) held recently at UC Berkeley. BioEHSC is hosted annually by the Bioengineering Honor Society (BioEHS) at Berkeley. Desai’s lecture, entitled “My Fantastic Voyage: A Convergence of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology,” captivated the sold-out crowd with dreams for their own future scientific adventures.
You may have read the recent news about UCSF being the top public recipient of biomedical research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In addition, the UCSF schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy all ranked first in their fields in federal funding for biomedical research and graduate-level training, and our researchers in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences were among the top grant recipients for the School of Pharmacy.
The UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences is pleased to announce the selection of Xiao Huang, PhD, as our 2017 Li Foundation Fellow. In addition to the prestige of the award, the selection carries a $31,500 stipend.
For the 37th consecutive year, the UCSF School of Pharmacy has received more funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) than any other pharmacy school in the United States. School researchers were awarded $28.2 million in grants during NIH’s 2016 fiscal year, from October 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016.
Among the top-funded researchers was Kathy Giacomini, PhD, a faculty member in the School’s department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences.
Nation debates possibility of dramatically new directions for health care coverage, science funding, immigration, education; Revealing malaria/HIV drug interactions in children; Decreasing cancer drug toxicity while increasing dose; Engineering safer opioids; Evidence for comprehensive medication management; Medicare Part D as a learning model for pharmacy education—impact 10 years out; New genetic insights into diabetes drug response; Annotating the ‘dark genome’; Epigenetics of ethnicity; New
Recipients of the UCSF School of Pharmacy 2017 Mary Anne Koda-Kimble Seed Award for Innovation will explore ideas ranging from possible new ways to treat obesity to new ways of accessing antibiotic-producing microbes found in soil. Five projects are being funded in this, the third round of awards since the fund was established in 2012.
Fifteen UC San Francisco faculty members have been named to the first cohort of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigators, including five from the School of Pharmacy.
