Disease hits home for UCSF postdoctoral fellow.

UCSF postdoctoral fellow Ramon Birnbaum and his daughter Ruth

When Ramon Birnbaum, Ph.D., came to UC San Francisco three years ago to do his postdoctoral work on the role of genetic regulation in human disease in the lab of School of Pharmacy faculty member Nadav Ahituv, Ph.D., epilepsy was barely on his radar.

Once, while serving in the Israeli military, he saw a fellow soldier suffer a seizure. Upon arriving on campus, just out of curiosity, he attended a presentation by Daniel Lowenstein, M.D., director of the UCSF Epilepsy Center. That was the sum total of Birnbaum’s experience with this spectrum of seizure disorders, which affect an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Then, in 2010, his daughter Ruth was born, and everything changed.

The parents of three healthy boys, Birnbaum and his wife, Adva, immediately noticed when 3-week-old Ruth exhibited “subtle but unusual repetitive movements.” Following her intuition, Adva took their newborn to the pediatrician, who suspected Ruth was having seizures.

According to Birnbaum, the first neurologist they consulted thought it was probable that Ruth had Ohtahara syndrome, a severe disorder with a grim prognosis. Indeed, despite prescribed medications, Ruth’s seizure rate worsened, he recalls. She suffered several clusters per day, with some involving hundreds of convulsions over the course of an hour.

“It’s hard to imagine and even harder when, as a parent, you can’t do anything to help her,” Birnbaum says. “Her brain was on fire 24/7 with no chance to develop normally.”

But a second opinion by Joseph Sullivan, M.D., director of the UCSF Pediatric Epilepsy Center, was more optimistic.

While abnormal electrical activity in Ruth’s brain was similar to that seen in Ohtahara, after viewing a homemade video of her seizures, Sullivan diagnosed her as having infantile spasms, a different type of early onset epilepsy.

For Birnbaum and his adviser, Ahituv, a geneticist in the UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, the experience fueled a drive to discover a genetic diagnosis for infantile spasms, and potentially for other epilepsies and complex diseases. Then, if an infant like Ruth Birnbaum develops a seizure disorder, physicians would know what it is sooner in order to treat it faster.

Read the full story on the UCSF School of Pharmacy website.

Coverage of the class of 2012 graduations.

Congratulations to the class of 2012.

More than 61,000 students on University of California campuses graduated this spring, joining the ranks of more than 1.6 million UC alumni. They include graduates from UC Health’s 16 professional schools in seven fields: dentistry, medicine, nursing, optometry, pharmacy, public health and veterinary medicine.

We’ve collected photos, tweets, Facebook posts and videos from commencement ceremonies at UC campuses on Storify to commemorate this year’s graduates. Find links to additional UC Health commencement coverage below.

UC Berkeley

• Optometry
• Public Health

UC Davis

• Medicine
• Nursing
• Veterinary Medicine

UC Irvine

• Medicine

UCLA (view photos)

• Dentistry
• Medicine
• Nursing
• Public Health

UC San Diego (view slideshow)

• Medicine
• Pharmacy

UC San Francisco

• Dentistry
• Medicine
• Nursing
• Pharmacy
  

Graduate profiles

• Selina Stasi, UCLA
• Mohamud Qadi, UC San Diego
• Angela Echiverri, UCSF (video)

More UC commencement coverage

Joseph Guglielmo has chaired UCSF’s Department of Clinical Pharmacy

Joseph Guglielmo, UC San Francisco

UC San Francisco has named Joseph Guglielmo, Pharm.D., an international expert in the clinical use of antimicrobials and chair of the Department of Clinical Pharmacy, as interim dean of the UCSF School of Pharmacy, starting July 1.

Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, M.D., M.P.H., who announced the appointment in an email to the UCSF community, noted the school’s pre-eminence in its field and the multiple contributions Guglielmo has made to UCSF in the 33 years he has served the university, as well as his breadth of leadership in education, clinical pharmacy practice and research.

Guglielmo is a renowned educator, clinical pharmacist and expert in the evidence-based, safe and effective use of antimicrobials to treat infections. He is a professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at UCSF, where he joined the faculty in 1979, and holds the Thomas A. Oliver Chair in Clinical Pharmacy. He also serves as assistant director for pharmaceutical services in the UCSF Medical Center, where he maintains a clinical practice as an infectious-disease pharmacist.

Widely known as an advocate for pharmacy research, Guglielmo has overseen a 44 percent increase in his department’s overall faculty research funding since he took the helm in 2006, including grants from the National Institutes of Health. During that time, the school also has consistently been ranked first in its field by the national U.S. News & World Report survey of Pharm.D. training programs.

Guglielmo’s international contributions to antibiotic safety include the UCSF Medical Center Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, which he developed in the 1980s to study and improve the practices governing the use of antimicrobials in hospitals. This evidence-based program was one of the earliest programs of its kind in the United States.

In 2007, Guglielmo created the UCSF Medications Outcome Center to research and consistently improve medication management in the UCSF Medical Center and beyond. He also created the HIV Pharmacy Program at the UCSF Medical Center, specifically supporting the Women and Men of Color Clinics. A firm believer in forging relationships among clinical scientists and their colleagues in basic and translational science, he has collaborated with neuroscience and neurology colleagues at UCSF on trying to develop a treatment for prion disease, and was actively involved in the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at its inception and during its renewal.

Guglielmo has taught pharmacy and medical students, residents and fellows for decades and is the recipient of many teaching awards, including the UCSF Lifetime Mentorship Award, Resident Preceptor of the Year Awards, UCSF School of Pharmacy Long Teaching Awards, and the Academic Senate Distinction in Teaching Award. He is the author of more than 110 peer-reviewed papers, the majority related to anti-infective agents.

A search is under way to find a permanent new dean for the UCSF School of Pharmacy to replace Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, Pharm.D., who will retire at the end of this month.

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UCSF approach could improve safety, decrease costs of drug development.

Brian Shoichet, UC San Francisco

A new set of computer models has successfully predicted negative side effects in hundreds of current drugs, based on the similarity between their chemical structures and those molecules known to cause side effects, according to a paper appearing online this week in the journal Nature.

The team, co-led by researchers in the UC San Francisco School of Pharmacy, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) and SeaChange Pharmaceuticals Inc. — a UCSF spinoff company launched by two of the paper’s authors — set out to test how well a computer model could help researchers eliminate risky drug prospects by identifying which ones were most likely to have adverse side effects.

Drugs frequently interact with more than one target, with hundreds of these targets linked to the side effects of clinically used therapeutics. Focusing on 656 drugs that are currently prescribed, with known safety records or side effects, the team was able to predict such undesirable targets — and thus potential side effects — half of the time.

That’s a significant leap forward from previous work, which has never tackled hundreds of compounds at once, according to Brian Shoichet, Ph.D., a UCSF professor of pharmaceutical chemistry who was the joint advisor on the project alongside Laszlo Urban, M.D., Ph.D., at Novartis.

As a result, it offers a possible new way for researchers to focus their efforts on developing the compounds that will be safest for patients, while potentially saving billions of dollars each year that goes into studying and developing drugs that fail.

“The biggest surprise was just how promiscuous the drugs were, with each drug hitting more than 10 percent of the targets, and how often the side-effect targets were unrelated to the previously known targets of the drugs,” said Shoichet, whose lab is renowned for its work in using computational simulations to identify new targets for known drugs. “That would have been hard to predict using standard scientific approaches.”

Adverse drug effects are the second most common reason, behind effectiveness, that potential drugs fail in clinical trials, according to the paper. The cost of developing an approvable drug is frequently cited at about $1 billion across 15 years, although recent estimates have ranged as high as $4 billion to $12 billion per drug, depending upon how many of these failures are included in the estimate.

“This basically gives you a computerized safety panel, so someday, when you’re deciding among hundreds of thousands of compounds to pursue, you could run a computer program to prioritize for those that may be safest,” said Michael Keiser, Ph.D., co-first author of the paper, who started working on the project as a doctoral student in Shoichet’s lab and co-founded SeaChange with Shoichet and John Irwin, Ph.D., also of UCSF, upon graduation.

It also offers the possibility for identifying possible new uses for medications that are already on the market, according to Peter Preusch, Ph.D., who oversees structure-based drug design grants at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which partly supported the study.

“By providing a way to identify the unintended targets of a drug, this advance will not only help streamline the drug development pipeline, but also will provide valuable guidance in efforts to repurpose existing drugs for new diseases and conditions,” Preusch said. “This work represents a notable contribution that is likely to find broad applications in the pharmaceutical arena.”

The project builds on UCSF’s legacy as a leader in developing computer-based approaches to efficiently screen millions of chemicals for those with the best potential for drug development. The UCSF School of Pharmacy was the first to develop computer-based molecular “docking” software, which both public and private researchers use to visualize how potential drugs might attach to target molecules to inhibit their function. It also builds upon UCSF’s commitment to industry collaborations that advance pharmaceutical science. Novartis has one of the strongest and most productive drug pipelines in the industry, with more than 130 projects in clinical development, according to the company.

The current project is based on technology UCSF developed, known as the “similarity ensemble approach” (SEA), which compares the shape of each drug to thousands of other compounds and uses that to predict which proteins they might both bind to — essentially, guilt by association. The technique was named among Wired magazine’s “Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009.”

In this project, the UCSF and SeaChange team ran a computer screen on 656 drugs that are currently in clinical use to predict which ones were most likely to bind to the 73 target proteins that appear on Novartis’ safety panel for testing drugs for side effects such as heart attacks.  Meanwhile, NIBR developed a statistical method of relating those targets to known side effects.

The computer model identified 1,241 possible side-effect targets for the 656 drugs, of which 348 were confirmed by Novartis’ proprietary database of drug interactions. Another 151 hits revealed potential side effects that had never been identified for these drugs, yet which Novartis confirmed through lab testing. Among those was a synthetic form of estrogen that has been known for years to cause stomach pain, with no known cause. The screen showed that it binds strongly to a target known as COX-1, which is the protein target of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as aspirin, which also can cause stomach pain, ulceration, and bleeding.

Keiser is co-first author on the Nature paper alongside Eugen Lounkine, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar in the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research whose postdoctoral advisors are Urban and Shoichet.

Additional authors include Steven Whitebread, Dmitri Mikhailov and Jeremy Jenkins, from the NIBR’s facilities in Cambridge, Mass.; Jacques Hamon, Eckhard Weber and Serge Côté, from NIBR in Basel, Switzerland; and Allison Doak, in the UCSF Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.

The project was supported by the National Institutes of Health and by the QB3 Rogers Family Foundation Bridging-the-Gap Award. The authors declare competing financial interests in the project: both Shoichet and Keiser are co-founders of SeaChange, which is developing the method to find new therapeutic uses of known drugs and address toxicology issues. Details are available in the online version of the article at www.nature.com/nature.

UCSF is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. For further information, please visit www.ucsf.edu.

For more information on SeaChange, visit seachangepharma.com.

For more on the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, visit www.nibr.com.

Nation’s top-ranked pharmacy school.

The UC San Francisco School of Pharmacy celebrated its 2012 commencement at a ceremony at Davies Symphony Hall on May 4.

Dean Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, Pharm.D., congratulated the graduates of the nation’s top-ranked pharmacy school while faculty, friends and family members looked on.

Goldie Leh helps Nina Nguyen with her graduation cap before the UCSF School of Pharmacy Commencement.

As the oldest school of pharmacy in the West, the UCSF School of Pharmacy has a long history of accomplishments in science, patient care, and in training tomorrow’s Ph.D. researchers and Pharm.D. clinicians.

The school administers or co-administers a wide variety of academic programs, including several graduate programs leading to Ph.D. degrees and a combined Pharm.D./Ph.D. degree. The school’s doctor of pharmacy program offers students a core clinical curriculum and the choice of one of three foci of further study in pharmaceutical care, pharmaceutical sciences, or pharmaceutical health policy and management.

UC Health initiative seeks to increase faculty diversity.

Toni Yancey, UCLA

By Alec Rosenberg

After three packed days of workshops examining career paths, effective communicating, negotiating and networking, 63 of UC Health’s brightest female postgraduate students were ready to relax.

Then the closing keynote speaker of the University of California Diversity Pipeline Initiative conference took the stage, motioned for them to stand up and made them march. UCLA public health professor Toni Yancey led the audience in a session of “Instant Recess,” a short routine of fun, low-impact movements designed to fight obesity. Energized and empowered, they laughed and then listened as the fashion model turned academic role model offered advice for the aspiring health professionals.

“I would work hard to find a mentor,” Yancey said. “You have so much available to you with the Internet and social media. Send an email. Send another email. Stop emailing and make a phone call! If the first person doesn’t work out, find another person.”

Persistence pays. It’s not easy becoming an academic, particularly if you’re a woman having to balance work and family life, but the sixth annual UC Diversity Pipeline Initiative conference made clear that the path is possible. The conference encourages UC underrepresented female professional and graduate students to pursue academic careers in the health sciences. It supports those efforts with mentoring — both for the students and for the faculty conference speakers.

For the students, who were selected by the deans of UC’s health professional schools at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, the conference was inspiring and eye-opening.

Participants at the UC Diversity Pipeline Initiative conference

“It’s encouraged me to enter a career in academic medicine,” said Juliet Okoroh, a Nigeria native who is a third-year medical student at UC San Diego and participant in the PRIME program focused on serving California’s underserved. “I really do want to work with immigrants and people of diverse backgrounds.”

UCSF nursing student Schola Matuvu agreed. “As a student of color, to see so many ethnicities in this conference, it attests to the fact that it’s important to have different perspectives and views, and it represents the people we are going to serve.”

This year’s conference added mentoring for UC faculty participating in the program to help them thrive in their careers and be better prepared to support sustained mentoring activities.

“It’s added another dimension to this conference, and it’s made it more powerful,” said Mijiza Sanchez, a conference organizer and director of the UCSF Multicultural Resource Center.

The conference is one of UC’s efforts to diversify its faculty. Increasing faculty diversity is a priority for UC leadership, as evidenced by new grant projects aimed at improving the hiring of women and minority faculty in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Faculty diversity varies across UC Health. In nursing, public health, pharmacy and veterinary medicine, nearly half of UC’s tenure-track faculty are women and less than 8 percent are underrepresented minorities. In dentistry and optometry, more than a quarter of tenure-track faculty are women with more than 6 percent underrepresented minorities. In medicine, it’s 21 percent women and 5 percent underrepresented minorities. While UC medical schools have increased student diversity at a rate outpacing California’s private schools and the national average, progress has been slower among faculty.

“You have to be committed to diversity over the long term,” said conference speaker Renee Navarro, UCSF vice chancellor for diversity and outreach. “These training programs take five, sometimes 10 years.”

Navarro was pleased that this year’s Diversity Pipeline Initiative conference sponsors included the clinical and translational science institutes of UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego and UCSF. Students also heard about the possibilities of pursuing clinical and translational research careers.

“We’re starting to plant the seed and identify a roadmap of how that could happen. There are opportunities. Many times people just aren’t aware of them,” Navarro said.

The April 13-15 conference also was sponsored by the UC Office of the President’s divisions of Academic Affairs and Health Sciences and Services, California HealthCare Foundation, and UCSF’s Multicultural Resource Center, Student Academic Affairs and Office of Diversity and Outreach.

UCLA professor of radiology and pediatrics Ines Boechat, a conference speaker and diversity champion, said she is encouraged by efforts such as the UC Diversity Pipeline Initiative.

“It’s very empowering to be in a roomful of women who share the same goals,” Boechat said. “You realize you are not alone.”

Alec Rosenberg is health communications coordinator in Integrated Communications at UC’s Office of the President. 

Santorum, Maddow, Colbert are wrong about UCSF.

UCSF dates its founding to 1864, when South Carolina surgeon Hugh Toland founded a private medical school in San Francisco. Above, nurses stand inside an operating room at UC Hospital in 1913.

Let the record reflect: American history is indeed taught at the University of California, San Francisco.

After presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently stated that American history was no longer offered at most UC campuses, reporters at several media outlets were quick to set the record straight. Several, including television hosts Rachel Maddow and Steven Colbert, pointed out that only one UC campus does not teach history — UCSF.

They got it wrong, too.

When UCSF history professor Dorothy Porter, Ph.D., heard MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow’s story on Tuesday night, she couldn’t react quickly enough.

“I know that Rachel likes to get her facts absolutely correct, so I sent off an email as soon as I could find an address for the show,” Porter said. Her message, reinforced by other UCSF history professors reached for comment this week, was simple: history is alive and well at UCSF.

The history of history at UCSF

History classes at UCSF have been around since the Great Depression, first taught to aspiring medical students in 1930. The university has offered degrees in history since the civil rights era, minting the Ph.D. program in the History of Health Sciences in 1965.

Today both master’s and doctoral degrees in the subject are offered through the university’s Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine. UCSF is, in fact, the only campus within the entire UC system that offers a doctoral degree in the history of the health sciences. Its scholars focus on both American and world history and contribute to our understanding of the conditions that make modern medicine what it is today.

“In our graduate programs, American history is not only taught — it is required,” said Brian Dolan, Ph.D., professor and vice chair of the department and the director of the graduate programs in history of health sciences.

Elective courses are available for the entire student body at UCSF’s four professional schools, whether in medicine, pharmacy, nursing or dentistry.

These courses offer a rich exploration of some of the key social, cultural, economic, and political contexts of American and world history — the development of medical science and technology in America, the development of the medical profession in the United States, and the history of therapies developed in America. Specialized courses include psychiatry in the United States, the history of American medicine, 20th century American medicine, and the history of social movements in America.

“Historical understanding of both scientific and health care breakthroughs and mistakes can provide enormous benefit to the health science and care that we are doing today,” said Nancy Milliken, M.D., vice dean of the UCSF School of Medicine, director of the UCSF Center of Excellence in Women’s Health and acting chair of the Department of Anthropology, History & Social Medicine.

“Informed by this perspective,” she added, “our students can be better prepared to advance health worldwide and contribute to collaborative science and systems of care.”

Related links:

• History of Medicine and Health Sciences Program at UCSF
• UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine
• A History of UCSF

UCSF’s annual forum focuses on health concerns.

Student organizers helped ensure the success of UCSF's fourth annual LGBT health forum.

For the fourth consecutive year, the UC San Francisco Center for LGBT Health & Equity convened a health forum, attracting 200 interprofessional health students for two days of education about the long-overlooked health concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGTBQI) people.

The 2012 forum held earlier this month highlighted two major developments in LGBT health since the 2011 meeting: the publication of an Institute of Medicine report on LGBT health concerns and the release of a groundbreaking “Field Guide” to best practices in LGBT patient-centered care by the Joint Commission, the accrediting body for the nation’s hospitals.

“Attention to LGBT health has skyrocketed since we held the first forum in 2009,” said Shane Snowdon, director of the UCSF Center for LGBT Health & Equity, which has convened the forum annually and served as project adviser for the Joint Commission’s LGBT Field Guide. “That’s no coincidence: UCSF has been a national leader in highlighting LGBT health needs and educating health professionals about them.”

This year’s forum, planned in conjunction with the UCSF LGBTQ Student Association, featured the UC premiere of “Gen Silent,” a powerful film about the challenges faced by LGBT elders. “The generation that fought hardest to come out is going back in . . . to survive,”  the film states.

A screening of the film, which moved many viewers to tears, was followed by a question-and-answer sessions with Seth Kilbourn, director of Openhouse, the non-profit that serves LGBT seniors in San Francisco.

The forum featured multiple workshops on LGBT health topics, a panel of LGBTQI patients speaking candidly about their health care experiences, and keynotes by Snowdon, noted sex educator Carol Queen and Darin Latimore, M.D., assistant dean for student and resident diversity at UC Davis School of Medicine.

Latimore also participated in a well-attended panel of health professionals discussing their individual journeys as “out” practitioners.

Students from UCSF’s schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy and physical therapy were joined by students from other institutions at the sold-out event, which offered elective credit. Evaluations of the forum were overwhelmingly positive, with many attendees indicating that it had significantly heightened their awareness of LGBT concerns in health care and beyond.

Many attendees shared the sentiments of a student who said, “I never really thought about whether my friends’ sexual orientation was important with respect to run-of-the-mill conversations, and I didn’t realize there were significant health implications associated with their sexuality. I think I’ll be asking more questions to encourage disclosure when I’m providing health care. Additionally, I think I’ll make fewer assumptions about other people, including my friend and family.”

Attendees also expressed appreciation for the attention paid to transgender health needs at the forum. “I feel more comfortable working with LGBTQI patients now, and have greatly improved knowledge about transgender health issues,” said an attendee. “I wish this forum was required for all students!”

Snowdon, who lectures on LGBTQI health in all of UCSF’s schools, notes that forum attendance has quadrupled since 2009, reflecting students’ intensifying interest in the subject. “When I became LGBT director in 1999, we could only dream of selling out a 200-student forum. I give our busy students tremendous credit for spending a weekend learning about LGBT health needs — their interest means a lot.”

Impact includes caring for uninsured patients, training professionals and conducting research.

For the first time, University of California Health has measured the collective impact it has in caring for uninsured patients, educating tomorrow’s health leaders and advancing science to tackle medicine’s toughest challenges.

The estimated community benefit of UC Health’s five medical centers totaled $3.3 billion last year.

“As a public university and cornerstone of the safety net, UC Health is committed to serve California’s health needs,” said Dr. John Stobo, UC senior vice president for health sciences and services.” Our combined community benefit demonstrates the powerful impact UC Health has as a system.”

Throughout UC Health, student-run clinics collaborate across their campuses and within their communities to treat patients from the working poor to the homeless and their pets. UC’s three nurse-run clinics provide compassionate care to underserved patients in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Francisco. UC’s innovative Programs in Medical Education (PRIME) train doctors where they are most needed with programs focused on rural health and telemedicine (UC Davis), the Latino community (UC Irvine), the diverse disadvantaged (UCLA, UC Riverside), the San Joaquin Valley (UC Merced, UC Davis, UCSF), health equity (UC San Diego), and the urban underserved (UCSF, UC Berkeley).

UC Health has the nation’s largest health sciences educational system, with 18 professional schools and programs on seven campuses. Its community impact is felt in all corners of the state, through telemedicine services, clinical trials, classroom collaborations and affiliations such as UCLA’s partnership with the Venice Family Clinic, the nation’s largest free clinic.

Community benefits include programs or activities that improve access to care, enhance community health, advance medical knowledge and reduce the burden of government or other community efforts.

Here is a breakdown of UC Health’s community benefit in fiscal 2011, with totals from the health sciences campuses that have medical centers – UC Davis, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC San Diego and UCSF:

-Charity care and unreimbursed care: $560.7 million
Free medical services for patients who had no source of payment for urgently needed care and the unpaid cost of Medicare, Medi-Cal, State Children’s Health Insurance Program, indigent care programs and other safety net programs.

-Education: $174.7 million
Health professions education encompasses teaching physicians, nurses and students as well as scholarships and funding for education.

-Donations/sponsorships: $1.8 million
Through financial and in-kind contributions, UC Health offers support to community organizations to improve community health.

-Research: $2.6 billion
UC research gives local residents access to the latest treatments and therapies for advanced illness and complex health conditions.

For more information, view UC Health’s community impact brochure.

Related links:

• UC Davis community benefit report
• UC San Diego community benefit fact sheet
• UCSF: committed to the city
  

U.S. News ranks UCSF pharmacy school first, UC medical schools near top.

University of California Health ranked among the nation’s best graduate schools in a survey released today (March 13) by U.S. News & World Report.

All five UC medical schools placed in the top 50 nationally for research rankings and four placed in the top 30 nationally for primary care rankings.

In research, UC San Francisco was the top-ranked public school and fifth among all U.S. schools, with UCLA 13th overall, UC San Diego tied for 16th, UC Davis tied for 42nd and UC Irvine tied for 44th. In primary care, UCSF tied for third, UCLA ranked 10th, UC Davis tied for 24th and UC San Diego tied for 27th. UCSF has the only medical school ranked in the top five of both categories.

Also, UCSF ranked first in pharmacy and UCLA first in clinical psychology while UC medical schools received high marks in a number of specialty programs. UCSF ranked first in AIDS, second in women’s health, third in internal medicine, tied for third in family medicine, sixth in drug/alcohol abuse, ninth in geriatrics and tied for 10th in pediatrics. UCLA ranked third in geriatrics, sixth in AIDS and seventh in drug/alcohol abuse. UC San Diego ranked eighth in AIDS and in drug/alcohol abuse. UC Davis tied for ninth in rural medicine.

U.S. News’ 2013 America’s Best Graduate Schools rankings were released online today (March 13) and can be viewed at www.usnews.com/grad.

The new rankings include previous assessments of a number of other health fields, which U.S. News also surveys but not each year. UC Davis ranked second in veterinary medicine, UCSF ranked tied for fourth in overall nursing, while in public health UC Berkeley tied for eighth and UCLA was 10th. The surveys do not rank dental or optometry schools.

UC Health runs five medical centers and the nation’s largest health sciences education system with more than 14,000 students and 18 health professional schools and programs in medicine, dentistry, nursing, optometry, pharmacy, public health and veterinary medicine.

Related links:

• UC Davis
• UCLA
• UC San Diego
• UC San Francisco 

After 46 years at UCSF, Mary Anne Koda-Kimble will retire at the end of June.

Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, Pharm.D., a well-loved dean at UCSF who led the School of Pharmacy to its enduring position as the premier such program in the United States, will retire at the end of June.

Koda-Kimble — whose 46 years at UCSF began as a Pharm.D. student — became in 1998 the first female dean of the top-ranked pharmacy school in the nation and the first leader from a clinical background. During her tenure as dean, she has left an impressive legacy, from strengthening and expanding laboratory-based research programs to breaking new ground in fostering programs that move research discoveries closer to clinical application.

Under her leadership, the school has hired young experts in physics, computation, bioengineering, clinical specialties, medication safety and clinical research. The number of full-time faculty has grown from 83 to 109, with 89 new hires.

“Mary Anne has made an extraordinary contribution to the field of pharmaceutical sciences, said UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, M.D., M.P.H. “She has played a key role in creating and building the field of clinical pharmacy, transforming pharmacists from pill-counters to professional experts on medications, interactions and personalized medicine. She also has hired an extraordinary faculty, made up of visionary scientists who are pushing the edge of therapeutic science. She will be deeply missed, not only for her tremendous vision and leadership, but for the personal touch she has brought to UCSF community, cultivating faculty and students alike to help them flourish.

“I am personally extremely grateful to her for postponing her retirement to help see the institution through the transition of my first years at UCSF. It clearly underscores her respect for the institution and the senior leadership team. Her service has been invaluable.”

[Related: Colleagues react to Koda-Kimble's legacy at UCSF]

Mary Anne Koda-Kimble, UC San Francisco

Koda-Kimble championed — along with School of Medicine leaders — the creation of a new Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences. This union helped meet the schools’ strategic goals of creating new research tools and working across the physical and biological sciences.

Koda-Kimble has overseen the accreditation and continued review of a revamped Pharm.D. curriculum. She, together with leaders in the School of Medicine, supported two, new, interdisciplinary, doctoral-degree programs, one in chemistry and chemical biology, and one in pharmaceutical sciences and pharmacogenomics. While at the helm, the school became an official partner with the UCSF/UC Berkeley Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering. She also created new interdisciplinary master’s degree programs in translational medicine and clinical research.

The UCSF School of Pharmacy has received more funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) than any other pharmacy school in the United States every year a since 1979. But during Koda-Kimble’s tenure as dean, funding from NIH grants has increased from more than $4 million in 1999 to more than $27 million.

“The research funding in all three of our departments, all led by strong chairs, has continually increased,” she says. “The funding numbers are a direct reflection on the quality of the science conducted here and its collaborative nature. Imagine — even with so many young new hires, the schools’ research funding has continued to rise. This speaks to an exceptional, brilliant faculty.”

“The school’s strides are absolutely those of the faculty supported by a talented staff,” she stresses. “My job has been to clear the path, facilitate the big thinking that results in great plans — all so the faculty and staff can march forward at the best possible pace. They are the pioneers.”

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Extending Innovation Network program selects three projects; other academic partners with Roche include UCSF.

Joan Heller Brown, UC San Diego

The new UC San Diego-Roche Extending Innovation Network (EIN) program has been launched with selection of its first three research projects at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine. The UC San Diego-Roche EIN program, which was formalized in June 2011, aims to accelerate the discovery of new drug therapies through research innovation at the interface of industry and academia. The program is slated to grow in the coming years as additional rounds of proposals are solicited.

Under this partnership, faculty-initiated research projects are selected for funding from proposals solicited campuswide on a planned biannual basis. The program is headed by a joint steering committee comprising two Roche researchers and two UC San Diego faculty members, Joan Heller Brown, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology, and Michael K. Gilson, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences and director of UC San Diego’s new Drug Discovery Institute.

“We are very pleased about this exciting and innovative partnership, which strengthens UCSD Health Sciences’ strategic goal of broadly advancing our programs in drug discovery,” said David A. Brenner, M.D., vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

The EIN program allows Roche to have the first look at in-licensing opportunities that match the company’s strategy, and is designed to further strengthen the cooperation between university research and pharmaceutical development. Other academic institutions that are partners with Roche in the EIN program include Harvard University and UC San Francisco.

The three two-year projects selected in this initial round will use innovative molecular technologies recently developed at UC San Diego to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disease and leukemia, with the ultimate goal of developing effective new treatments.

“This funding will help provide important new opportunities to translate basic discoveries and leading-edge technologies from UC San Diego’s research laboratories into needed therapies for patients — an effort being spearheaded by our new Drug Discovery Institute,” said Palmer Taylor, Ph.D., associate vice chancellor for health sciences and dean of the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The three projects selected for this initial round of funding are as follows.

Xiang-Dong Fu, Ph.D., professor of cellular and molecular medicine and member of the UC San Diego Institute of Genomic Medicine, in collaboration with Michael G. Rosenfeld, M.D., will use cutting-edge genomic and RNA-based approaches to help identify new potential therapeutic targets.  Coupled with a new gene-signature approach, this research project could identify compounds that will ultimately lead to the discovery of new neuropsychiatric drugs.

Paul Insel, Ph.D., professor of pharmacology and medicine, will investigate the expression of the GPCR family of receptors on the surface of cells from patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). There are limited successful therapies for CLL, which is the most common form of adult leukemia and can progress to a very aggressive form that is rapidly lethal.  Insel seeks to identify new targets for drugs to improve the course of this disease.

Gene Yeo, Ph.D., assistant professor of cellular and molecular medicine, will apply innovative technologies to detect abnormal patterns of RNA in neurons and discover molecules that reverse these defects. This work has promise for the treatment of a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders.