University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

Most pandemics start when a pathogen spreads from animals to humans. It’s a leading explanation, in fact, for the COVID-19 pandemic: the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, is a cousin to coronaviruses that live in bats.

Congenital heart disease is a condition primarily associated with infants and children, but that is changing. More adults than children now live with congenital heart disease (ACHD) in the U.S., an estimated 2 million adults, and that number is increasing at a rate of 5% to 10% each year.

Until the early 2000s, we believed that dementia was the price we paid if we lost the genetic lottery, assuming we live long enough. Today, the scientific evidence suggests that circumstances we can control — lifestyle habits, medical conditions, and environmental factors — make up about 40% to 45% of the risk.

UC San Francisco researchers have developed a new form of deep brain stimulation (DBS) that adjusts in real time as a person walks, helping to improve gait and reduce falls in people with Parkinson’s disease. The study, publishing June 15 in Nature Medicine, demonstrates for the first time that an implanted brain stimulator can detect neural signals associated with each step and automatically adjust stimulation within fractions of a second.

Roarke Kamber, PhD, an assistant professor in the Anatomy department at UC San Francisco, has been named a 2026 Pew-Stewart Scholar, an award that supports early-career scientists who pursue breakthroughs in cancer development, diagnosis, and treatment. Kamber studies macrophages (“big eater” in Greek), the immune system’s garbage disposal cells. They consume sick or dead cells — up to 200 billion per day in each of us — plus pathogens and debris.

Open up your favorite podcast app or tune into TikTok these days, and you’ll find an endless stream of influencers, health coaches, and so-called experts offering advice for how to prevent and fight cancer. But who to trust? UC San Francisco scientists have uncovered important scientific links between diet and cancer.

Women with HIV most often die from preventable, trauma-related conditions like substance use and mental illness — not the virus itself. Yet, these leading causes are largely missing from official death records, according to new research by UC San Francisco. The study is the first to compare death certificates to the causes of death identified by doctors, nurses, social workers, and pharmacists who knew them well.

S. Andrew Josephson, MD, a master clinician and educator who has led UC San Francisco’s top-ranked Department of Neurology since 2017, has been named the next dean of the UCSF School of Medicine and vice chancellor for clinical affairs. “I could not be more honored and thrilled to help lead the School of Medicine during this time of tremendous challenge and unprecedented opportunity,” Josephson said.

The team gathered 94 drug candidates that other laboratories had flagged as potential persister therapies. They wanted to test each drug, at different doses, on persisters from two types of lung cancer that had been treated with standard therapies. It would require 10,000 painstaking, week-long experiments — so they built a robotic platform to eliminate the labor and inconsistency of doing it by hand. Thousands of miniature tumors sat in stacks of 384-well plates inside controlled incubators.

Artificial intelligence can help predict a patient’s risk for conditions such as sepsis, heart disease, and cancer. But many of these tools fall short in real-life clinical practice because they are difficult for doctors to interpret and trust. Researchers at UC San Francisco have developed a new way to use AI to build clinical prediction tools that combines the speed of artificial intelligence with the judgment of human experts.