News Archive

November 3, 2015 — Patients with unexplained low blood counts and abnormally mutated cells who do not fit the diagnostic criteria for recognized blood cancers should be described as having clonal cytopenias of undetermined significance, suggest UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers in a recent paper. The researchers found the condition surprisingly common in older patients with low blood counts.

November 2, 2015 — The NSF has announced funding for a ‘Big Data’ Innovation Hub for the Western United States intended to facilitate collaboration among the region’s technology sector and other organizations to address research challenges across areas such as precision medicine, natural resource utilization, hazard management, and metro regional development. The Western Hub is part of an NSF program announced today that includes four awards totaling more than $5 million to establish regional hubs for data science innovation.

November 2, 2015 — Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a model that could be used to predict a drug’s side effects on different patients. The proof of concept study is aimed at determining how different individuals will respond to a drug treatment and could help assess whether a drug is suitable for a particular patient based on measurements taken from the patient’s blood.

October 30, 2015 — Patients with glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor, usually survive fewer than 15 months following diagnosis. Since there are no effective treatments for the deadly disease, University of California, San Diego researchers developed a new computational strategy to search for molecules that could be developed into glioblastoma drugs. In mouse models of human glioblastoma, one molecule they found shrank the average tumor size by half. The study is published October 30 by Oncotarget.

October 30, 2015 — A new study has shown that changing ocean conditions have adversely impacted fish off California. The researchers compared data sets from the CalCOFI program and power plant cooling water intakes along the California coastline. The data show that fish abundance from both studies has declined sharply since 1970, with a 72 percent decline in overall larval fish abundance in the CalCOFI data set and a 78 percent decline in fishes from the PPI sampling.

October 30, 2015 — The brain cells of patients with bipolar disorder, a manic-depressive illness characterized by severe swings in mood, energy and ability to carry out daily tasks, are more sensitive to stimuli than other people’s brain cells, reports an international team of scientists headed by researchers at Salk Institute for Biological Studies and University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

October 29, 2015 — University of California climate and energy experts announced 10 scalable solutions for moving the world towards carbon neutrality, a practical framework that outlines both immediate and longer-term actions for staving off catastrophic climate change. The solutions were announced during the UC Summit on Carbon and Climate Neutrality that was held at UC San Diego Oct. 26-27.

October 29, 2015 — Innovation. Exploration. Impact. All aptly describe the work of this year’s Founders Symposium speakers. The research and scholarly activities of our award-winning faculty advance the frontiers of knowledge, shape new fields, and disseminate solutions that transform lives. This year’s Symposium speakers exemplify UC San Diego’s impact as a public research university with TED-style talks that share how storytelling and multimedia narratives can amplify community voices; explore the prospects for a world free from hunger; and discuss ethics to guide society’s response to new science and technology. Attendees will also learn about the relational approach to change and learning; what works and what doesn’t in foreign aid; and how interactive documentary theatre can create institutional change.

October 29, 2015 — Researchers at the American Gut Project, the world’s largest crowdsourced, crowdfunded science project, are celebrating a big milestone this week—in the past two years, they have raised more than $1 million from over 6,500 “citizen scientists” who have agreed to have their microbiomes sequenced.

October 29, 2015 — You are only 10 percent human. Ninety percent of the cells that make up our bodies are actually bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes. And researchers are now finding that these unique microbial communities — called microbiomes — can greatly influence human and environmental health. The human gut microbiome alone has now been linked to allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and many other conditions.