May 23 event to feature top scientists, honor Marion Sandler.

Herbert and Marion Sandler received the UCSF Medal in 2010 from UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann.

A program that fosters basic science projects of potentially high impact that allow researchers to be creative, risky, and transformative is celebrating 15 years of discovery at UC San Francisco.

Today, few programs in the world support scientists like the Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research (PBBR).

A beacon for the most courageous among UCSF investigators, PBBR uses private philanthropy to fund only those ideas that challenge conventional wisdom and could never qualify for funding from increasingly conservative grant sources like the National Institutes of Health.

“This unique program dares our scientists to dig deeper, ask tougher questions, and invent novel approaches that defy the status quo,” says Keith Yamamoto, Ph.D., vice chancellor for research at UCSF who directs the PBBR.

Established by co-founders Herbert and Marion Sandler, the program formerly known as the Sandler Program in Basic Science, is currently in its 16th year. Investigators credit the program with engendering more than $500 million in subsequent grant funding, and projects and their derivatives have resulted in well over 1,000 publications and several patents.

The UCSF community is invited to join the scientists and supporters who have made PBBR’s success possible at a special event from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in Genentech Hall on the UCSF Mission Bay campus on Thursday, May 23.

The event program, titled “Unconventional Wisdom: Advancing Scientific Discovery by Breaking the Rules,” will feature a conversation with panelists moderated by Michael Krasny, Ph.D., host of KQED Forum. The event also will feature a video tribute to Marion Sandler, who passed away last year at her home in San Francisco after a long battle with severe asthma and migraine headaches. Closing remarks will be delivered by Herb Sandler and UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, M.D., M.P.H.

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ViVita Technologies includes UC Davis vet, three biomedical engineering doctoral students.

The winning team for both first place and People's Choice: (from left) Maelene Wong, biomedical engineering graduate student; Leigh Griffiths, assistant professor of veterinary medicine and epidemiology; Jeni Lee, biomedical engineering graduate student; and Gina MacBarb, biomedical engineering graduate student.

A new approach to tissue preparation that makes heart valve replacements less likely to be rejected by the body’s immune system — potentially giving transplant patients longer, healthier lives — was the clear favorite in this year’s UC Davis business plan competition — sweeping both the first prize and the People’s Choice award.

ViVita Technologies, a team comprising a UC Davis veterinarian and three biomedical engineering doctoral students, took home a total of $12,000 in the 13th annual Big Bang! Business Plan Competition, run by MBA students in the UC Davis Graduate School of Management: $10,000 for first place, decided by a team of judges, and $2,000 for the People’s Choice award, decided by a vote of the approximately 150 people who attended the awards ceremony Thursday evening (May 16) at the UC Davis Conference Center.

Second prize of $5,000 went to Davis Chem, a team that is working to commercialize a sustainable method of producing isobutryaldehyde, a common base chemical used in everything from paint to cosmetics, with genetically modified E. coli bacteria rather than with the petroleum products currently used in production.

ViVita Technologies was driven to create its product to address the current shortage of organs. “But unlike with current heart valve transplants, the patient would be free from a lifetime of drugs,” said Maelene Wong, chief executive officer of the nascent company.

The ViVita process removes substances that trigger patients’ immune response while preserving the structural integrity and functional properties of the replacement valve tissue. The method has been successfully tested on small animals, they said.

The proprietary process allows the patient’s own cells to join and grow with the transplant tissue — a process that the team says could eventually be used for any organ transplant. Such an organ transplant would allow the person to lead a normal, healthy life without fear of organ rejection and the need to spend a lifetime on anti-rejection medication. It would also allow for better transplant methods for children, who often need new transplants, and additional surgeries, when their bodies grow, Wong said.

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Caring Wisely initiative funds two projects.

As part of efforts to reduce the cost of health care while also improving quality, the UCSF Center for Healthcare Value (CHV) has announced winners of its “Caring Wisely” initiative.

The initiative gives awards of up to $50,000 for interventions to reduce health care costs at UCSF Medical Center. The CHV team awarded funding for two projects from among 20 proposals submitted through UCSF Open Proposals.

“The Caring Wisely initiative helped to bring out even more of the creativity, collaboration and innovation that exists within our world-class hospital,” said Joshua Adler, M.D., chief medical officer of UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. “I anticipate that progress will be made in response to several proposals, and in particular, the two winning proposals represent opportunities that are right for both the medical center and for patients.”

Read about the winning proposals

‘Robo-doc’ navigates on its own, frees doctors to focus on the critically ill.

Dr. Paul Vespa and EVA, UCLA

Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, the world’s first hospital to introduce a remote-presence robot into its neurological intensive-care unit in 2005, now welcomes the RP-VITA, the first robot able to navigate the hospital on its own.

UCLA staff affectionately dubbed the 5’5″, 176-pound robot “EVA,” for executive virtual attending physician. Unlike earlier models that physicians steered via a computer-linked joystick, this version drives on auto-pilot, freeing doctors to devote more time to patient care.

“During a stroke, the loss of a few minutes can mean the difference between preserving or losing brain function,” said Dr. Paul Vespa, director of neurocritical care at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and a professor of neurosurgery and neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “This new advance enables me to concentrate on caring for my patients without being distracted by the need to set up and manage its technological features.”

With a simple push of an iPad button, Vespa can send the robot gliding down the hall to a patient’s room. Equipped with 30 sensors that enable the it to “see” when its route is blocked by a gurney or curious bystander, EVA possesses the intelligence to self-correct and plot a detour to its destination.

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New initiative to help drive precision medicine forward.

UCSF physician leaders (from left) Michael Blum, Andy Auerbach, Ellen Webber, Russ Cucina and Seth Bokser helped roll out the medical center's electronic records system known as APeX.

UC San Francisco is creating a Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) to lead the transformation of health care delivery and discovery from empiric, generalized, disease-based diagnostic and treatment approaches to the era of individualized precision medicine.

UCSF Chief Medical Information Officer Michael Blum, M.D., has been tapped to lead the CDHI in the new position of associate vice chancellor for informatics. Blum will continue to report to Joshua Adler, M.D., chief medical officer at the UCSF Medical Center, and now also UCSF Vice Chancellor of Research Keith Yamamoto, Ph.D.

In his new role, Blum, a cardiologist and clinical professor of medicine, will coordinate and leverage UCSF’s information technology assets.

The focus of the CDHI is developing new technologies, apps, and systems that, along with the explosion of social media, will generate enormous new data sets.

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May 3 event will air later on UCTV.

Mark Laret, UC San Francisco

Academic and health industry leaders will discuss the latest efforts to achieve better health care at a lower cost at the University of California Center for Health Quality and Innovation’s second annual colloquium Friday (May 3) in Oakland.

UC San Francisco Medical Center CEO Mark Laret will give the keynote address, “A Call to Action for Academic Medical Centers to ‘Think Differently.’” David Lansky, president and CEO of the Pacific Business Group on Health, will provide an employer’s perspective on health care costs and quality.

A panel discussion on what health plans are looking for from providers will feature health insurance executives from Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Health Net Inc. Another panel will focus on innovations by researchers from UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego and UCSF.

There also will be poster presentations, an announcement of innovation center grant winners and remarks by UC Health Senior Vice President Dr. John Stobo, innovation center Executive Director Terry Leach and UC Office of the President enterprise risk management Director Terri Kielhorn. (View agenda.)

Media interested in attending the 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. event at the Oakland Marriott City Center, 1001 Broadway, should call (510) 987-9200. Talks from the colloquium also will air on UCTV beginning in mid-May. For a schedule, and to view videos from the first colloquium, visit: www.uctv.tv/chqi.

About UC Health
University of California Health includes five academic health centers — UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC San Francisco — with 10 hospitals and 18 health professional schools and programs on seven UC campuses. For more information, visit http://health.universityofcalifornia.edu.

About the UC Center for Health Quality and Innovation
UC Health launched the Center for Health Quality and Innovation in October 2010. The center is designed to promote, support and nurture innovations at UC medical center campuses and hospitals to improve quality, access and value in the delivery of health care. For more information, visit http://health.universityofcalifornia.edu/innovation-center or email chqi.info@ucop.edu.

Minimally invasive technique part of clinical trial for higher-risk surgical patients.

Doctors at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center have become the first on the West Coast to perform a new, less-invasive procedure to help clear plaque-ridden carotid arteries. The procedure, which is part of a clinical trial, took place on March 28.

Just as arteries to the heart can become clogged with plaque, causing a blockage, so can the two carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain. Every year, more than 300,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with such blockages, which, if left untreated, can reduce or even stop blood flow to the brain, causing a potentially disabling stroke.

Current treatment options include the traditional “open” surgery approach to clean out the carotid artery and a minimally invasive alternative that uses a stent to keep the artery open.

Each of these options has some limitations. Traditional surgery involves making a large incision along the neck and carries the risk of surgical complications. While less invasive, the stent procedure requires the insertion of a catheter through an artery in the groin to guide the stent into place, which can potentially dislodge plaque; loose plaque can travel through the bloodstream and cause a blockage. Some studies have indicated that the stent procedure carries a higher risk of stroke than the surgical procedure.

The new technique and device system being tested at UCLA is called transcarotid stenting with dynamic flow reversal, or the Silk Road Procedure, which allows physicians to deliver a stent directly into the carotid artery from the neck, offering a shorter, potentially safer route than the typical stent procedure.

A unique aspect of the new system is the ability to temporarily divert blood flow away from the plaque during the procedure to help ensure that a patient’s brain is fully protected from plaque debris at all times. Physicians redirect blood flow from the carotid artery where the team is working into tubing set up outside the body and then back into the body through the femoral vein, near the groin.

Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is one of 25 centers around the world participating in the clinical study, called the ROADSTER trial, which is designed for high–surgical risk patients who may be older or have especially narrowed arteries.

“We’re always seeking new options for patients with the ultimate goal of treating these carotid artery blockages with the least procedural risk,” said Dr. Wesley Moore, UCLA study investigator and a professor emeritus of vascular surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “We look forward to contributing to this important research.”

The study is funded by Silk Road Medical, developers of the transcarotid stenting with dynamic flow reversal system.

For more information on the clinical trial at UCLA, please call (310) 206-1115.

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UC Berkeley discovery leads to production of partially synthetic version of arteminisin.

Twelve years after a breakthrough discovery in his UC Berkeley laboratory, professor of chemical engineering Jay Keasling is seeing his dream come true.

Today (April 11), the pharmaceutical company Sanofi will launch the large-scale production of a partially synthetic version of artemisinin, a chemical critical to making today’s front-line antimalaria drug, based on Keasling’s discovery.

Jay Keasling with children in a village outside Nairobi, Kenya

The drug is the first triumph of the nascent field of synthetic biology and will be, Keasling hopes, a lifesaver for the hundreds of millions of people in developing countries who each year contract malaria and more than 650,000, most of them children, who die of the disease. Synthetic biology involves inserting a dozen or more genes into microbes to make them produce drugs, chemicals or biofuels that they normally would not.

Keasling and colleagues at Amyris, a company he co-founded in 2003 to bring the lab-bench discovery to the marketplace, will publish in the April 25 issue of Nature the sequence of genes they introduced into yeast that allowed Sanofi to make the chemical precursor of artemisinin. The paper became available online April 10.

“It is incredible,” says Keasling, who also serves as associate director for biosciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and as CEO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville. “The time scale hasn’t been that long, it just seems like a long time. There were many places along the way where it could have failed.”

The yeast strain developed by Amyris based on Keasling’s initial research and now used by Sanofi produces a chemical precursor of artemisinin, a compound that until now has been extracted from the sweet wormwood plant, Artemsia annua. Artemisinin from either sweet wormwood or the engineered yeast is then turned into the active antimalarial drug artesunate, and typically mixed with another antimalarial drug in what is called arteminsinin combination therapy, or ACT.

Global demand for artemisinin has increased since 2005, when the World Health Organization identified ACTs as the most effective malaria treatment available. Sanofi said that it is committed to producing semisynthetic artemisinin at its new production line in Gerassio, Italy, using a no-profit, no-loss production model, which will help to maintain a low price for developing countries. Though the price of ACTs will vary from product to product, the new source for its key ingredient, in addition to the plant-derived supply, should lead to a stable cost and steady supply, Keasling said.

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Brain stimulation in rats suggests new, unconventional therapy.

Cortical nuerons. Image courtesy of NIH/A. Bonci

By stimulating one part of the brain with laser light, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at UC San Francisco (UCSF) have shown that they can wipe away addictive behavior in rats – or conversely turn non-addicted rats into compulsive cocaine seekers.

“When we turn on a laser light in the prelimbic region of the prefrontal cortex, the compulsive cocaine seeking is gone,” said Antonello Bonci, MD, scientific director of the intramural research program at the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), where the work was done. Bonci is also an adjunct professor of neurology at UCSF and an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Described this week in the journal Nature, the new study demonstrates the central role the prefrontal cortex plays in compulsive cocaine addiction. It also suggests a new therapy that could be tested immediately in humans, said Billy Chen of NIDA, the lead author of the study.

Any new human therapy would not be based on using lasers, but would most likely rely on electromagnetic stimulation outside the scalp, in particular a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Clinical trials are now being designed to test whether this approach works, Chen added.

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