October 7, 2011
Personalized medicine and new gene discoveries in human disease were a focus of a daylong symposium hosted by the UCSF Institute for Human Genetics on the Mission Bay campus on Oct. 3. Participants in a human genetics symposium honoring the late UCSF medical geneticist Charles ...
October 3, 2011
Kathy Giacomini, PhD Every year, the pharmaceutical industry invests billions of dollars in testing drugs that are eventually abandoned because they don’t work or cause side effects. What if scientists could make better use of technology to predict which drugs will work and pinpoint the patients they’re most likely to help? UCSF scientists are doing just that as they pioneer a new field — quantitative pharmacology — aimed at improving the efficiency of the drug development process. UCSF's new Center for Quantitative Pharmacology held its first symposium on Sept. 22 and 23, bringing together scientists from academia and industry. A joint department of the schools of pharmacy and medicine, the center brings together faculty for cross-disciplinary research as well as developing courses in this emergent discipline. The new center represents the latest step in UCSF’s significant and ongoing contributions to drug discovery. Kathy Giacomini, PhD, co-chair of the new center and the symposium, answered questions about the burgeoning field of quantitative pharmacology in a recent interview. Giacomini is a professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Science in the UCSF School of Pharmacy. Q: The pharmaceutical and biotech industry is facing huge challenges. Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved 21 new drugs, down from 25 in 2009 and 24 in 2008. A Pfizer Inc. executive at your symposium noted the cost of developing a new drug has reached $1.8 billion when the expense of all the drugs that fail to make it to market is included. Is the industry in crisis? A: Yes, I think the industry has been in crisis for a period of time. They’re also responding to that crisis by changing the way they develop drugs, forming new partnerships with academia. Our partnership with Pfizer may represent a new model for drug discovery and development. (Note: Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company, announced last year that it would provide up to $85 million in funding and milestone payments over the next five years to support research at UCSF that may lead to development of new drugs.) Q: Why do so many drugs fail to make it through the testing process and get abandoned or rejected? A: The newest data suggest that they largely fail due to a lack of efficacy. They enter phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials and the drug people thought would work doesn’t work. There’s also a failure rate of 15 to 20 percent because of safety issues. So you have to ask the question: Why didn’t it work? And why couldn’t they predict that it wasn’t going to work? One reason is they don’t know enough about the drug in humans. They don’t have enough information on the drug’s action and its effect on human biology. The second is there’s a need for integrative models that will help predict these things. That’s where quantitative pharmacology comes in.
September 30, 2011
Breast Cancer Month: Time to Take Stock of UCSF Advances The eve of Breast Cancer Awareness month is an opportune time to take stock of some of the recent progress being made at UCSF, home to one of the preeminent cancer centers in the nation.
September 29, 2011
In 2009, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force updated its recommendations for screening healthy women using mammography. The task force is an independent panel of experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine that makes recommendations on a broad range of clinical preventive health care services, such ...
September 29, 2011
Brain tumor specimens taken from neurosurgery cases at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center has given scientists a new window on the transformation that occurs as healthy brain cells begin to form tumors. The work may help identify new drugs to target ...
September 7, 2011
Researchers with the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Merced will examine the effectiveness of state and local anti-smoking programs across the United States to ensure that health authorities are able to use their increasingly limited resources to support and defend ...September 7, 2011
Girls may be vulnerable to environmental exposures that contribute to breast cancer decades later – the evidence comes from studies of Japanese atomic bomb survivors and studies of women who received radiation treatment for medical conditions when they were girls. Rodent studies also point to ...
September 1, 2011
For the first time in his life, 50-year-old Art Wagner is growing a beard. He wants people to ask why. He will tell them that he is a survivor of prostate cancer, the second-leading cause of cancer death in men. He will tell them that ...
August 29, 2011
Linda Giudice remembers the day, about 10 years ago, when a woman she was treating asked if her multiple miscarriages might have been the result of growing up on the Love Canal, a former toxic waste site near Niagara Falls. That conversation led to a ...August 24, 2011
Current estimates of the impact of chemotherapy on women’s reproductive health are too low, according to a University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) study. The researchers say their analysis of the age-specific, long-term effects of chemotherapy provides new insights that will help patients and clinicians ...
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Meet more of Our Heroes »#CancerResearch seminar is today's #Pancreas retreat keynote speaker Mark Philips @NYU. Live stream for @UCSF 4pm: http://t.co/2zwXT1nf9u
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