January 28, 2016
January 28, 2016 —
In two weeks, UC San Diego Health orthopaedic surgeon Dr. Sonya Ahmed will head to Lillehammer, Norway for the 2016 Winter Youth Olympic Games. Ahmed is a former elite athlete herself—competing internationally in gymnastics and in collegiate pole vaulting. But this time she’s heading to the world stage not as an athlete, but as a doctor.
January 14, 2016
January 14, 2016 —
Health care providers are facing increasing pressure to achieve better patient outcomes, faster. With that in mind, Candis Morello, PharmD, and her team of Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences students set up what they call a Diabetes Intensive Medical Management “tune up” clinic for complex type 2 diabetes patients at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.
January 7, 2016
January 7, 2016 —
The new year is a time to take stock of past accomplishments, and UC San Diego has no shortage of those. We once again surpassed $1 billion in research funding in 2014-15, an extraordinary accomplishment that places us among the top five research universities in the nation. And we put that research funding to good use — in 2015, Washington Monthly once again ranked UC San Diego as the No. 1 university in the nation for its positive impact. The new year is also a time to look forward to what we want to accomplish next. Here, 14 visionaries from around the campus share their “big ideas” for revolutionizing our local community and our planet — in 2016 and beyond.
November 30, 2015
November 30, 2015 —
Many human gene variants have evolved specifically to protect older adults against neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, thus preserving their contributions to society, report University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers in the November 30 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
November 16, 2015
November 16, 2015 —
In just the past few years, researchers have found a way to use a naturally occurring bacterial system known as CRISPR/Cas9 to inactivate or correct specific genes in any organism. CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing activity runs continuously, though, leading to risk of additional editing at unwanted sites. Now, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, Ludwig Cancer Research and Isis Pharmaceuticals demonstrate a commercially feasible way to use RNA to turn the CRISPR-Cas9 system on and off as desired — permanently editing a gene, but only temporarily activating CRISPR-Cas9.
November 9, 2015
November 9, 2015 —
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine developed a method to expand the types of chromosomal abnormalities that noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) can detect. The study, published November 9 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses a semiconductor sequencing platform to identify small chromosomal deletions or duplications, such as occur in Cri du Chat Syndrome and DiGeorge Syndrome, with a simple blood test from the expectant mother.
October 30, 2015
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 29, 2015
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
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.
October 15, 2015
October 15, 2015 —
Roughly one in nine people on Earth do not have enough food to eat. And climate change is only making it harder for farmers to meet the global demand for food, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By 2030, the IPCC expects climate change to reduce crop and pasture yields by as much as 14 percent in some parts of the world. Adapting crops, livestock and fisheries will be critical for global food security.
