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A new study by researchers at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has identified what they believe to be a key reason behind patients’ treatment-resistance in the rare inflammatory disorder HLH. The finding could offer additional insights into other immune conditions, including a type of childhood leukemia and the severe inflammation response in some children with COVID-19.

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Survival may more than double for adults with glioblastoma, the most common and deadly type of brain tumor, if neurosurgeons remove the surrounding tissue as aggressively as they remove the cancerous core of the tumor.  This discovery, reported in a retrospective study headed by researchers at UC San Francisco, is welcome news for those in the glioblastoma community, which celebrated its last breakthrough in 2005 with the introduction of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide.

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Pelvic examinations and cervical cancer screenings are no longer recommended for most females under age 21 during routine health visits, but a new study has found that millions of young women are unnecessarily undergoing the tests, which can lead to false-positive testing, over-treatment, anxiety and needless cost.  Researchers at UC San Francisco and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated that 1.

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JUUL delivers substantially more nicotine to the blood per puff than cigarettes or previous-generation e-cigarettes (e-cigs) and impairs blood vessel function comparable to cigarette smoke, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco.  The study, which appears online Jan. 4, 2019, in Tobacco Regulatory Science, found that nicotine concentrations were five to eight times higher in rodents that were exposed to JUUL versus other tobacco products.

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Glioblastomas are the most aggressive form of brain cancer - they grow and spread rapidly through the brain and are virtually impossible to eradicate, typically leading to death within one or two years of diagnosis. Scientists are constantly seeking more powerful targeted therapies, but so far without success — in part because glioblastomas are challenging to study in a laboratory setting.

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UC San Francisco announced Thursday it will establish the UCSF Benioff Initiative for Prostate Cancer Research, made possible by a $35 million gift from Marc and Lynne Benioff.

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Despite a broad campaign among physician groups to reduce the amount of imaging in medicine, the rates of use of CT, MRI and other scans have continued to increase in both the U.S. and Ontario, Canada, according to a new study of more than 135 million imaging exams conducted by researchers at UC Davis, UC San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente.

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Earlier this month, Nina Shah, MD, joined other myeloma patients, caregivers, and clinical providers on a three-day trek across Iceland’s spectacular landscape.

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Skin cancer can strike anyone — and exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays is a leading risk factor.

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UCSF Medical Center has been recognized among the nation’s elite hospitals in U.S. News & World Report’s 2019-2020 Best Hospitals survey, marking the 21st year that UCSF Health has been listed among the top 10 hospitals in the prestigious listings and best in Northern California.

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Using advanced technology, scientists at Chan Zuckerberg (CZ) Biohub, Mayo Clinic and UC San Francisco, have discovered an autoimmune disease that appears to affect men with testicular cancer.

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Use of medical imaging during pregnancy increased significantly in the United States, a new study has found, with nearly a four-fold rise over the last two decades in the number of women undergoing computed tomography CT scans, which expose mothers and fetuses to radiation. Pregnant women are warned to minimize radiation exposure.

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The new UCSF Bakar Precision Cancer Medicine Building opened late June in Mission Bay. The treatments, technologies, and models of care offered to patients in this new space will reflect the most current thinking in how to tailor treatment to individual patients based on unique and defining characteristics of their tumors, personal genetics, and lifestyle.

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In late June, UC San Francisco opened the Bakar Precision Cancer Medicine Building, a pioneering cancer center devoted to providing adult patients with highly advanced treatments, including immunotherapy, genetic counseling, molecular profiling of tumors, fully integrated clinical trials, and advanced imaging.

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Signaling its continued commitment to pioneering research, UC San Francisco has appointed Rohit Gupta as its inaugural Chief Biobank Officer (CBO). His appointment, which follows a national search, is effective June 19.

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Wearing red ribbons in honor of their mentor Dr. Arti Hurria, Drs. Li-Wen Huang and Melisa Wong of the UCSF Older Adult Cancer Care Program discuss the emerging field of geriatric oncology research. Mentorship within a close-knit community is driving interest in the field of geriatric oncology. Dr. Li-Wen Huang, Hematology Oncology Fellow, and Dr.

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Jennifer Doudna, PhD, and Jonathan Weissman, PhD. Photo by Barbara Ries GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) has launched a five-year, $67 million collaboration with the San Francisco and Berkeley campuses of the University of California to build a state-of-the-art laboratory that will use CRISPR technologies to explore how genes cause disease and to rapidly accelerate the discovery of new medicines.

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This week, Luke Gilbert, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of Urology, and a Goldberg-Benioff Endowed Professor in Prostate Cancer Translational Biology, was named a member of the 2019 class of the Pew-Stewart Scholars Program for Cancer Research. Gilbert was one of seven early-career scientists working in the US to garner the award.

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Dr. Lawrence Fong, leader of the HDFCCC Cancer Immunotherapy Program, was featured last month on the CureTalks podcast for a live discussion of the latest in cancer immunotherapy research, clinical trials, and treatments. Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that helps your immune system fight cancer. Several types of immunotherapy are used to treat cancer.

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UC San Francisco researchers have discovered a new type of stem cell in mouse muscles that is resistant to radiation and other forms of cellular stress. The findings have implications for improving recovery for cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy and could even lead to treatments to protect future astronauts from the ravages of deep-space radiation.

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UC San Francisco cancer biologist Alan Ashworth, PhD, structural biologist Yifan Cheng, PhD, and molecular physiologist Holly Ingraham, PhD, have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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UCSF researchers have discovered that STAG2 – a gene commonly mutated in several human cancers – plays an essential role in DNA replication, revealing potential mechanisms for therapeutically targeting glioblastoma and other cancers.

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UC San Francisco is collaborating with the nonprofit Lazarex Cancer Foundation on a three-year study to identify ways to improve cancer clinical trial participation among medically underserved populations, including low-income individuals and racial and ethnic minorities.

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Reducing smoking, and its associated health effects, among Medicaid recipients in each state by just 1 percent would result in $2.6 billion in total Medicaid savings the following year, according to new research by UC San Francisco.

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UC San Francisco scientists have designed a large-scale screen that efficiently identifies drugs that are potent cancer-killers when combined, but only weakly effective when used alone. Using this technique, the researchers eradicated a devastating blood cancer and certain solid tumor cells by jointly administering drugs that are only partially effective when used as single-agent therapies.

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UC San Francisco researchers have identified a surprising phenomenon that may explain why many cancers don’t respond to certain immunotherapy drugs, and hints at new strategies to unleash the immune system against disease.

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Following the self-disclosure of Jeopardy's Alex Trebek that he is battling pancreas cancer, ABC7 News sat down with UCSF's Dr. Andrew Ko at our Mission Bay campus to discuss common questions about the disease.

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A landmark mammography study has found that women who receive annual breast cancer screenings will have a lower mortality rate and will benefit more from therapy upon diagnosis of breast cancer.

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A new study investigating prostate cancer deaths by race has found that African American men have twice the chance of dying from low-risk prostate cancer than men of other racial and ethnic groups, even after adjusting for socioeconomic status.

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Claims by the tobacco industry that heated tobacco products (HTPs) are safer than conventional cigarettes are not supported by the industry’s own data and are likely to be misunderstood by consumers, according to research published in a special issue of Tobacco Control.

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A new study of prostate cancer in 202 men, whose cancers had spread and were resistant to standard treatment, found that a surprisingly large number of these cancers – about 17 percent – belong to a deadlier subtype of metastatic prostate cancer.

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UC San Francisco researchers have discovered a promising new line of attack against lethal, treatment-resistant prostate cancer. Analysis of hundreds of human prostate tumors revealed that the most aggressive cancers depend on a built-in cellular stress response to put a brake on their own hot-wired physiology.

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Adolescents who smoke e-cigarettes are exposed to significant levels of potentially cancer-causing chemicals also found in tobacco cigarettes, even when the e-cigarettes do not contain nicotine, according to a study by UC San Francisco researchers.

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Nonsmoking adolescents who use e-cigarettes, smokeless tobacco or tobacco water pipes are more likely to start smoking conventional cigarettes within a year, according to new research by UC San Francisco.

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A new UC San Francisco–led study challenges the dogma in oncology that most cancers are caused by one dominant “driver” mutation that can be treated in isolation with a single targeted drug.

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Women who receive a breast cancer diagnosis while they are still young enough to bear children can take time to freeze their eggs and embryos without fear of delaying their cancer treatment, according to research by UC San Francisco scientists who have helped develop a faster fertility preservation technique that can achieve in two weeks what used to take a month or longer.

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The University of California’s five academic cancer centers, home to some of the world’s leading scientists and physicians, have formed a consortium to better address California’s most pressing cancer-related problems and opportunities, UC President Janet Napolitano and Dr. John Stobo, executive vice president of UC Health, announced today.

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A research team led by scientists at UC San Francisco has developed a computational method to systematically probe massive amounts of open-access data to discover new ways to use drugs, including some that have already been approved for other uses.

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Colon cancer patients who have a healthy body weight, exercise regularly and eat a diet high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables have a significantly lower risk of cancer recurrence or death, according to a research team led by UC San Francisco investigators. This finding represents an analysis of data collected on patients participating in a national study for people with stage III colon cancer.

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New UC Project Finds Roadmap to Improve Patient Safety in Radiation Exposure

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Choosing among cancer treatments increasingly involves determining whether tumor cells harbor specific, mutated “oncogenes” that drive abnormal growth and that may also be especially vulnerable or resistant to particular drugs. But according to a new study led by UCSF researchers, in the case of the most commonly mutated cancer-driving oncogene, called KRAS (pronounced “kay-rass”), response to treatment can change as tumors evolve, either when a normal copy of the gene from the other member of the matched chromosome pair is lost, or when the cancers cells evolve to produce additional copies of the mutated form of the gene.

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Scalp cooling can lessen some chemotherapy-induced hair loss – one of the most devastating hallmarks of cancer – in certain breast cancer patients, according to a new multicenter study from UC San Francisco, Weill Cornell Medicine and three other medical centers.   A majority of the study’s patients, all women with stage 1 or 2 breast cancer who underwent scalp cooling, retained more than half of their hair after completing chemotherapy, the investigators learned.

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Karla Kerlikowske, MD, and team recently published a paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that examined the role of common risk factors in the development of ER-positive and ER-negative breast cancers. The study sheds new light on how a woman’s age, weight, and menopausal status affect her risk for breast cancer. Dr. Kerlikowske discusses the findings below.

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Cancer is the leading cause of death in San Francisco and costs patients, families and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Seeing an opportunity to change this, a group that includes UC San Francisco (UCSF), the City and County of San Francisco, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (DPH), and health care and community organizations has launched the San Francisco Cancer Initiative (SF CAN), a major public health effort to reduce cancer in San Francisco.

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A team of researchers led by UC San Francisco scientists has identified a new drug target for triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive disease subtype that has the poorest outcomes and accounts for as many as one in five cases. The findings are particularly noteworthy because drugs that act on the newly discovered target, a protein known as PIM1, are already in clinical trials for leukemia and multiple myeloma.

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The UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of only 12 academic centers in the U.S. joining a large national precision medicine study that aims to improve survival for pancreatic cancer patients. The trial, called Precision Promise, is a joint effort between the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, cancer research and treatment centers, and the pharmaceutical industry. The goal of Precision Promise is to double survival by 2020.

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UC San Francisco scientists have engineered human immune cells that can precisely locate diseased cells anywhere in the body and execute a wide range of customizable responses, including the delivery of drugs or other therapeutic payloads directly to tumors or other unhealthy tissues. In experiments with mice, these immune cells, called synNotch T cells, efficiently homed in on tumors and released a specialized antibody therapy, eradicating the cancer without attacking normal cells.

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Three UCSF researchers have been awarded $680,000 in grants from Susan G. Komen to support projects in breast cancer research. The grants to UCSF were among a total of $32.7 million given to researchers in 23 states and seven countries for projects including research into metastatic disease, novel treatments for aggressive types of breast cancer, new technologies, and health equity.

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By employing the same tactics it used to drive policymaking from the 1970s-1990s, the tobacco industry has become successful in influencing pro-industry e-cigarette laws at the state level, according to a UCSF study published in the September issue of Milbank Quarterly.