Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences have found that the breast cancer drug tamoxifen gives white blood cells a boost, better enabling them to respond to, ensnare and kill bacteria in laboratory experiments. Tamoxifen treatment in mice also enhances clearance of the antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogen MRSA and reduces mortality.
Many leukemias are caused by loss of the enzyme Pten. Some anti-leukemia treatments work by inhibiting another enzyme called Shp2. Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have now found that mice lacking both of these enzymes can’t produce and sustain enough red blood cells. The study, published October 12 by PNAS, helps explain why anemia is a common side effect of anti-cancer drugs that target enzymes involved in tumor growth.
With their tiny forelimbs and long hindlimbs and feet, jerboas are oddly proportioned creatures that look something like a pint-size cross between a kangaroo and the common mouse. How these 33 species of desert-dwelling rodents from Northern Africa and Asia evolved their remarkable limbs over the past 50 million years from a five-toed, quadrupedal ancestor shared with the modern mouse to the three-toed bipedal jerboa is detailed in a paper published in this week’s issue of the journal Current Biology.
By the age of 4, Matthew Haemsch had undergone 16 rounds of chemotherapy and a surgery to remove a cancerous tumor on his adrenal gland. Yet, his small body remained riddled with a rare pediatric cancer.
University of California, San Diego School of Medicine’s Rob Knight, PhD, and his team built a microbiome analysis platform called QIIME (pronounced “chime” and short for “Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology”). This software will now be more readily accessible to hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world through BaseSpace, a cloud-based app store offered by Illumina, a San Diego-based company that develops life science tools for the analysis of genetic variation.
The University of California, San Diego is named the 19th best university in the world in U.S. News and World Report’s second-annual global rankings, released today. The campus is one of only five public universities in the U.S. to make the top 20 in the list of the world’s top 750 colleges. The rankings measure factors such as research, global and regional reputation, international collaboration as well as number of highly-cited papers and doctorates awarded. The U.S. News Best Global Universities 2016 edition also features 22 subject rankings, in which UC San Diego received high marks for its academic areas, such as pharmacology and toxicology (4), neuroscience and behavior (6), biology and biochemistry (6), psychiatry and psychology (7), computer science (9), as well as molecular biology and genetics (10).
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