research

Berkeley neuroscientist Yang Dan will help conduct an ambitious $9 million project exploring how the circuitry in the brain progressively goes awry in patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Dan brings her expertise as an acclaimed sleep scientist to an international team of investigators recently awarded the funding over the next three years by the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative.

Researchers led by Prof Tanja Koremme have glimpsed how protein molecular switches regulate a large number of different biological processes simultaneously, and the findings may shed light on how disease mutations operate.

The Kidney Project, a nationwide collaboration led by Shuvo Roy, PhD of UC San Francisco and William Fissell, MD of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), has been awarded KidneyX’s Phase 1 Artificial Kidney Prize for combining the two essential parts of its artificial kidney, the hemofilter and the bioreactor, and successfully implanting the smartphone-sized device for preclinical evaluation.

UCSF professor Leor Weinberger and his team discovered a fundamental mechanism that appears to speed the transformation of stem cells into other cell types.

Graduate program researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on a screen. The work was conducted by Bioengineering group faculty Edward Chang and Karunesh Ganguly, PhD students Sean Metzger and Jessie Liu, alumni David Moses and Josh Chartier, and collaborators.

In this virtual lab tour, Gokul Ramadoss from the Conklin Lab, and Serah Kang, from the McDevitt Lab – two labs in the Bioengineering Graduate Program – talk about their recent study that highlights the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on the heart.

A new study led by graduate program faculty members Todd McDevitt and Bruce Conklin helps explain how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, inflicts damage on heart cells. The team’s findings, shared publicly on bioRxiv, show the virus’s unexpected effects on the structure of heart cells in the lab, as well as in heart tissue from COVID-19 patients.

UC Berkeley professor and BioE Graduate Program member Na Ji and collaborators have built a microscope that can image the brain of an alert mouse 1,000 times a second, recording for the first time the passage of millisecond electrical pulses through neurons.

Professor Todd McDevitt, with colleagues at Gladstone Institutes and Boston University, have used a computational model to learn how to coax stem cells into forming new arrangements, including those that might eventually be useful in generating personalized organs.

UC San Francisco was the top public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2018, the 12th year in a row that UCSF claimed the top spot among public institutions, and the eighth straight year in which the University ranked second overall among institutions nationwide.