March 26, 2018
March 26, 2018 —
Receptivity to advertising for e-cigarettes, cigarettes and cigars were confirmed to be associated with those who would try the respective tobacco product within one year. However, receptivity to e-cigarette advertising also independently increased the odds that 12- to 21-year-olds who have never smoked would try cigarette smoking within the next year by 60 percent. This finding, publishing in the March 26 issue of JAMA Pediatrics, was independent of receptivity to cigarette advertising.
March 13, 2018
March 13, 2018 —
Each year, at precisely the same moment — 12 p.m. on the East coast, 9 a.m. on the West — thousands of graduating medical school students across the country simultaneously tear open an envelope. The single sheet of paper inside informs each graduate where he or she will do their residencies. This rite of passage for medical students will mark a new chapter in their already remarkable stories. Here are three.
March 9, 2018
March 9, 2018 —
Fueled by a multimillion dollar grant from the state’s stem cell agency, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, in collaboration with local biotechnology company Oncternal Therapeutics, have launched a phase Ib/II clinical trial to evaluate the combined effectiveness of a standard of care drug with a novel monoclonal antibody that target B-cell malignancies, which include leukemias and lymphomas.
March 8, 2018
March 8, 2018 —
Through a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II clinical trial, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that small doses of NGM282, a non-tumorigenic variant of an endocrine gastrointestinal hormone, can significantly and rapidly decrease liver fat content in patients with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). The findings, they say, represent an important proof-of-concept for the compound as there are currently no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments for NAFLD and NASH.
March 7, 2018
March 7, 2018 —
UC San Diego Health is the first hospital in California to use the fifth generation troponin test to diagnose heart attack. Approved in the United States in 2017, the more sensitive test can detect heart attack within an hour, as opposed to three to six hours.
March 6, 2018
March 6, 2018 —
The study, published in the March 5 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), describes how the supercomputing power of Gordon, Comet, and GPU clusters, all based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, were used with improved accelerated molecular dynamics (aMD) or Gaussian aMD (GaMD) to simulate the merger of a G-protein “mimetic nanobody” to a G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), the largest and most diverse group of membrane receptors in animals, plants, fungi, and protozoa.
March 5, 2018
March 5, 2018 —
On March 12, 2018, UC San Diego Health will welcome its first patients to the Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion. Located on the La Jolla campus, the new 156,000-square-foot facility represents the most recent addition to the university’s world-class medical campus. In the past five years, UC San Diego Health has invested more than $1.3 billion dollars in patient care facilities for the community.
March 5, 2018
March 5, 2018 —
For the first time, an international team of scientists, led by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, have determined that an Alzheimer’s disease (AD) polygenic risk score can be used to correctly identify adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who were only in their 50s. MCI is considered a precursor to AD.
March 5, 2018
March 5, 2018 —
UC San Diego School of Medicine researchers developed a visible neural network and used it to build DCell, a virtual model of a functioning brewer’s yeast cell. To do this, they amassed all knowledge of cell biology in one place and created a hierarchy of these cellular components. Then they mapped standard machine learning algorithms to this knowledgebase. DCell can be viewed at
d-cell.ucsd.edu. The technical details are published March 5 in
Nature Methods.
February 28, 2018
February 28, 2018 —
Science continues to peel away layers of the skin microbiome to reveal its protective properties. In a study published in Science Advances on February 28, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers report a potential new role for some bacteria on the skin: protecting against cancer.
