Neglected tropical diseases are a group of chronic and disabling parasitic infections that primarily affect poor and underserved communities. These diseases affect more than 1 billion people globally, yet are rarely the target of new drug discovery efforts. Leveraging its strengths in molecular biology, clinical research and pharmaceutical sciences, the University of California San Diego has now launched a new Center for Anti-Parasitic Drug Discovery and Development to address this unmet need in global health.
Rising drug prices have gotten a lot of attention lately, but the actual cost of prescription medications is more than just the bill. Researchers at Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of California San Diego estimate that illness and death resulting from non-optimized medication therapy costs $528.4 billion annually, equivalent to 16 percent of total U.S. health care expenditures in 2016. The analysis is published March 26 by Annals of Pharmacotherapy.
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.
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.
The War on Drugs has been ongoing for several decades, yet its failure can be felt on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. In the last sixteen years, the opioid epidemic has claimed close to 125,000 lives in the U.S., whereas in Mexico the war on drugs has produced an estimated 200,000 deaths and over 30,000 disappearances in the last decade.
Researchers at UC San Diego have developed macrophage "nanosponges"—nanoparticles cloaked in the cell membranes of macrophages—that can safely remove sepsis-causing molecules from the bloodstream. In lab tests, these macrophage nanosponges improved survival rates in mice with sepsis.
