News & Events

Sandy Feng, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Surgery at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), has been appointed the inaugural Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Surgery. In her new role, Dr. Feng will serve as a leader in advancing the research mission of the Department, with particular focus on deepening and broadening the Department's research portfolio, including basic and translational science, education and clinical/health services research, and innovation pathways. During her distinguished decades-long career at UCSF, Dr. Feng has mentored medical students, residents, [...]

James M. Gardner, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of Transplant Surgery, has been awarded an appointment to the prestigious Physician-Scientist Scholar Program (PSSP), part of the UCSF Sandler Fellows Program. All of the Departments in the University are invited to nominate candidates who compete for the award, only one of which is given per year. Dr. Gardner was nominated by Chris E. Freise, M.D. and Julie Ann Sosa, MD, MA, FACS, and is the first surgeon to receive this award. The appointment provides $1.25M in direct research funding over five years. The [...]

Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) announced $68 million in funding to support the Human Cell Atlas and its selection of 38 collaborative science teams to launch CZI's Seed Networks for a Human Cell Atlas projects. These collaborative groups bring together scientists, computational biologists, software engineers, and physicians to support the continued development of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), an international effort to map all cells in the human body. Minnie M. Sarwal M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, DCH, Director of the Sarwal Lab, and professor and director of Precision Transplant Medicine in [...]

Joyce A. Trompeta, Ph.D., PNP, Assistant Professor in the Department of Surgery, has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant from the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs / Japan-United States Educational Commission. Dr. Trompeta will examine the organ donation and transplantation attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge among a population key to Japan's future - Japanese university students, as well as faculty and healthcare providers who often are the ones who promote and request organ donation consent. Her research will be conducted at Kumamoto University, [...]

Researcher of the Month: Peter Stock, MD, PhD As a pivotal figure in HIV-to-HIV organ transplantation and its legalization through the passage of the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act, transplant surgeon Peter G. Stock, MD., PhD., continues to strive toward breakthroughs in research. While Stock is mostly known for his HIV transplantation work, he has been investigating pancreatic islet transplantation (also known as beta cell replacement) to cure type 1 diabetes since his days as a PhD student at the University of Minnesota. In May, the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine [...]

The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) awarded $11.08 Million to Dr. Peter Stock at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to conduct a clinical trial for treatment of Type 1 Diabetes (T1D)... The trial will be using parathyroid glands to aid in the success and viability of the transplant procedure.  Co-transplantation of islets and parathyroid glands, from the same donor, substantially increases beta cell survival, potentially enabling adequate long-term insulin production and removing the need for multiple donors.  Additionally, the co-transplantation will [...]

Just 42 years old, Erosalyn Deveza was drifting toward death. Her kidneys were barely functioning. She was constantly exhausted. She had vertigo and vomited frequently. She was tethered to a home dialysis machine for eight hours each night as she slept. A kidney transplant was the only thing that could save her, but it was unlikely to happen in time in the United States. No one on Deveza's side of the family could provide an organ through a living donation, doctors said, because all were at risk for the same kidney disease. It was too dangerous to leave any of them with a single kidney. Other [...]

UCSF molecular immunologist Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, Ph.D.,@enhancerleo, a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratories of Dr. Qizhi Tang and Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone at UCSF, received a Future of Science Fund Scholarship from the Keystone Symposia on Molecular Biology to attend one of the organization's meetings in Breckenridge, Colorado, on "Uncovering Mechanisms of Immune-Based Therapy in Cancer and Autoimmunity". Keystone Symposia on Molecular and Cellular Biology has a 47-year history of convening open, peer-reviewed conferences that connect the scientific community and accelerate life science [...]

UCSF Researchers Recommend Creation of National Donor Registry While organ transplant recipients receive continual care as the end-stage treatment to their condition, attention also should be given to living donors, who can suffer from hypertension, diabetes and other disorders after donation, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.  As reported online April 12, 2019, in JAMA Network Open, by aggregating data from publicly available clinical studies, the researchers found that nearly one in seven kidney donors experienced a potentially adverse event that may be related to [...]

Hillary Braun, MD, a third-year (PGY-3) general surgery resident at UCSF, has been awarded a prestigious two-year resident research scholarship by the American College of Surgeons for 2019-2021. The scholarships are supported by the generosity of Fellows, Chapters, and friends of the College, to encourage residents to pursue careers in academic surgery.  Dr. Braun's research will focus on  the impact of domestic and international travel for transplantation on disparities in U.S. solid organ transplantation with the goal of generating data to inform national policy around these issues.  Dr. [...]

Arya Zarinsefat, M.D., a UCSF general surgery resident and research fellow in the Sarwal Lab, has been awarded a prestigious UCSF-Gladstone Center For AIDS Research (CFAR) Mentored Scientist Award.  Dr. Zarinsefat's research will focus on better understanding the genes and process of rejection in kidney transplantation of HIV-infected recipients. The study will apply an innovative method of discovering rejection in HIV-infected kidney transplants by performing DNA cytosine methylation sequencing of plasma samples of individuals with rejection. Methyl-Seq is a novel next-generation [...]

UCSF molecular immunologist Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, Ph.D.,@enhancerleo, a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratories of Dr. Qizhi Tang and Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone at UCSF, has been awarded the 2019 Jeffrey G. Klein Family Diabetes Fellowship to study engineered regulatory T cells (Tregs).  The proposal, titled "Designing next-generation regulatory T cell therapies for type 1 diabetes",supports translational immunology research in type 1 diabetes (T1D). Specifically, Dr. Ferreira will investigate design principles, mechanisms, and associated function of chimeric antigen receptor-modified Tregs [...]

Simon N. Chu, M.S., a 4th Year UCSF medical student and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Fellow in the laboratory of Qizhi Tang, Ph.D., has been awarded the 2019 Association for Academic Surgery Outstanding Medical Student Award at the 14th Annual Academic Surgical Congress held in Houston, Texas on February 5-7, 2019. Chu is co-mentored by transplant surgeon Peter G. Stock, M.D., Ph.D. Chu is also a member of the PRIME Program in Medicine for the Urban Underserved. Chu was selected to compete in the Association's national medical student oral abstract presentation competition. [...]

Molecular immunologist and human genome engineer Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratories of Dr. Qizhi Tang (Department of Surgery) and Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone (Diabetes Center) at UCSF, was interviewed about his research on the talk show 'Cognitum' on NewTV. 'Cognitum' is a show dedicated to exploring the present and future of science and technology. Over the course of two episodes, Dr. Ferreira expounded his work as a pioneer in the use of genome editing in human blood cells and discussed his current efforts to engineer regulatory T cells (Tregs) as living [...]

The UCSF Surgical and Critical Care Nurse Practitioner Fellowship Program, a joint program of the Department of Surgery, Department of Anesthesia, and UCSF Health, was recently awarded the Accreditation with Distinction, the highest recognition awarded by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Accreditation Program: UCSF Surgical and Critical Care Fellowship Program is accredited with distinction as a Practice Transition Program by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission on Accreditation. The Surgical and Critical Care Nurse Practitioner Fellowship Program is led by nurse [...]

Immunologist Qizhi Tang, Ph.D., professor and director of the Department of Surgery's Transplantation Research Lab and Tang Lab, is one of the featured speakers at the first annual UCSF Immuno"XX": Women in Immunology Symposium on October 22, 2018 and will lead the session on Tolerance and Immunity.   Immuno"XX" is focused on two goals: 1) providing a platform to highlight female scientists from UCSF, and 2) building a community of female immunologists to facilitate collaborations and provide career building opportunities. Synapse, the UCSF student newspaper, recently published an article [...]

Nancy Ascher, M.D., Ph.D., the world-renowned organ transplant surgeon and a former Chair of the UCSF Department of Surgery, has also been invited to serve on the WHO Task Force on Donation and Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues, an international multidisciplinary task force of 31 experts spanning the fields of medicine, surgery, ethics, law, patients' rights, public administration and health systems. The task force is charged with establishing the fundamentals of ethical transplantation, providing guidance to health ministries and governments pertaining to legislation, registries, [...]

In the medieval ages, alchemists dedicated their lifetimes searching for the formula that would transform ordinary metals into gold. In our bodies, several cases of "cellular alchemy" have been reported. Known as transdifferentiation, this process consists of one specialized cell type transmuting into a different one.  Until now, this phenomenon had only been observed in the context of replenishing cells lost from pre-existing structures. Now, UCSF researchers, led by Holger Willenbring, MD, PhD, professor of surgery and associate director of the Liver Center at UCSF, and a member of the Eli [...]

Leonardo M.R. Ferreira, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar and molecular immunologist in the Tang Lab and Bluestone Lab at UCSF, received a "Trainee Poster Award" from the American Association of Immunologists (AAI) at the organization's 2018 annual meeting in Austin, Texas. The award is given for first-author abstracts submitted for poster sessions found to be exceptional by the AAI Abstract Programming Chairs. The poster, entitled "Tailoring a New Generation of Chimeric Antigen Receptors for Regulatory T Cells", reported on Dr. Ferreira's research on the design and development of novel chimeric [...]

Survivor on the Margins I first noticed Richard on a Wednesday before my 8am lecture, sitting in a corner of the nursing building's food court. Or rather, it was the first time I really noticed him, because I realized I had seen him sitting there before, looking ahead contentedly with his hands folded on the table in front of him. Richard, it turns out, is a historic patient at UCSF; one of the first people worldwide to receive a kidney transplant. Born with renal failure in the early 1960s, Richard received his transplant at UCSF in 1971 at age ten, at a time when such procedures were [...]