News & Events

Kidney failure is a debilitating and ultimately deadly illness, and a health policy crisis. With 468,000 people on dialysis in the U.S., costing the government $31 billion dollars a year, very little money is spent on researching alternatives to current treatments. Wired magazine’s Megan Molteni visited Shuvo Roy...

UCSF News reports on the results of study led by Carter Lebares, M.D., assistant professor and director the UCSF Center for Mindfulness in Surgery, to assess burnout in general surgery residents. An online survey was distributed in September, 2016, to all ACGME-accredited general surgery programs. Stress, anxiety...

UCLA, UCSF and City of Hope have received a five-year, $8 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to study how a common virus called cytomegalovirus may provoke the immune system to reject transplanted kidneys. Minnie M. Sarwal M.D., Ph.D., FRCP, DCH , professor and director of...

The Atlantic reports on the difficulties in the current climate of conducting donor-intervention research due to issues of informed consent, disagreements over what constitutes human subject research, and conflicting views of Institutional Review Boards (IRB) spread across multiple centers with patients putatively...

James M. Gardner, M.D., Ph.D. and Nicole Conkling, M.D. have been awarded prestigious research grants by the American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) for its 2017 funding cycle. Dr. Gardner, who just completed his Chief Residency in General Surgery at UCSF and is a rising fellow in the Division of Transplant...

The NIH has awarded the UCSF Department of Surgery a T32 training grant , “Filling a Void of Research Training for Transplant Surgeons” (FAVOR). The grant, awarded in August 2016, provides annual funding in the amount of $156,602 for in-depth training of three general surgery residents with an interest in...

UCSF News reports on the research of the Willenbring Lab and others demonstrating in mice that healthy new liver cells could be generated within the organ itself, thus making engraftment unnecessary. The article noted that the very cells that drive liver disease were converted, thereby reducing liver damage and...

UCSF News reports on a clinical trial, BENEFIT (Belatacept Evaluation of Nephroprotection and Efficacy as First-line Immunosuppression Trial) where for the first time, an immunosuppressive agent, Belatacept, showed better organ survival in kidney transplant recipients than a calcineurin inhibitor, the current...

The American Society of Transplant Surgeons (ASTS) has awarded Qizhi Tang, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Division of Transplant Surgery at UCSF, and Director of the Transplantation Research Laboratory and Tang Laboratory, was awarded a Faculty Research Grant for Biomarker Discovery and Functional Genomics, The...

A new video on AASLD TV (American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases) features the UCSF Liver Transplant Program and faculty John P. Roberts, M.D. , Norah A. Terrault, M.D., M.P.H. and Francis Y.K. Yao, M.D. A s a leader in the treatment of liver disease and transplantation, UCSF has performed more than 2...

Nature Reviews Nephrology recently reported on the Sarwal Lab's research elucidating the role of AECAs in graft rejection: Evidence from clinical studies has implicated non-HLA anti-endothelial cell antibodies (AECAs) in transplant rejection. However, the pathogenic mechanisms by whch these antibodies might...

Successful downstaging of selected patients with HCC (hepatocellular carcinoma) before liver transplantation leads to excellent 5-year recurrence-free and overall survival rates post-transplant, according to a just-reported multicenter study led by UCSF Transplant Program investigators. Medscape Medical News...