Diabetes Center's James Lee, MD, has been named a recipient of the 2021 Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy Early Career Researchers awards, along with five other exceptional scholars from UCSF, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, receiving in total almost $3 million of funding. The goal of the program is to empower ambitious researchers to pursue their boldest ideas to transform the immunotherapy and cell and gene therapy landscape for cancer patients.

UCSF has a bold vision to create a first-of-its-kind clinical diagnostic center that will advance precision diabetes research. The goal is to provide a central resource for families with type 1 diabetes and other heritable immunological conditions to receive personalized care and genetic counseling. This crucial multi-disciplinary effort will work to unravel the mysteries behind complex immunological disorders and exemplifies the translational research, from bench lab to bedside, being conducted by UCSF’s clinician-scientists across the campuses.

Originally published in Endpoint News, by John Carroll

The diabetes drug Teplizumab has taken another step forward in the long, painfully slow trek out of the research and development wilderness, and the next stop could be the FDA.

Not to be confused with type 2 diabetes, the most common form of diabetes in which your body does not use insulin properly, type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease which causes the destruction of insulin producing pancreatic beta cells. Patients with type 1 diabetes require insulin injections for survival. While there are multiple drugs designed to treat type 2 diabetes, type 1 is controlled with insulin - an onerous burden especially when one considers that this disease often begins in childhood.

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) has awarded the 15th AACR-Irving Weinstein Foundation Distinguished Lectureship to Jeffrey Bluestone, PhD

The AACR-Irving Weinstein Foundation Distinguished Lectureship was established in 2004 to acknowledge an individual whose outstanding personal innovation in science and whose position as a thought leader in fields relevant to cancer research has had, and continues to have, the potential to inspire creative thinking and new directions in cancer research. The recipient of this award is selected annually by the AACR President.

Though cancer immunotherapy has become a promising standard-of-care treatment—and in some cases, perhaps a cure—for a wide variety of different cancers, it doesn’t work for everyone, and researchers have increasingly turned their attention to understanding why.

The cause of the pancreatic inflammation plaguing a rural California family has been a medical mystery since it was first described 51 years ago. Now genetic sleuth-work by researchers from UCSF and University of Chicago has solved the mystery: pointing to a novel gene mutation as the cause of the family’s inherited pancreatitis.

A study of human and mouse pancreatic tissue suggests a new origin story for type 1 diabetes. The findings flip current assumptions about the causes of the disease on their head and demonstrate a promising new preventative strategy that dramatically reduced disease risk in laboratory animals.

In Cell Metabolism, Anil Bhushan and his team show that pancreatic beta cells themselves may play a much more active role in T1 diabetes than previously appreciated, opening the door to a totally new avenue for therapy. 

UC San Francisco researchers have for the first time transformed human stem cells into mature insulin-producing cells, a major breakthrough in the effort to develop a cure for type 1 (T1) diabetes. 

Replacing these cells, which are lost in patients with T1 diabetes, has long been a dream of regenerative medicine, but until now scientists had not been able to figure out how to produce cells in a lab dish that work as they do in healthy adults.

Suneil Koliwad has been appointed Chief of the Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism at UCSF Health, taking over from David Gardner, who retired after a long and distinguished career.