| UCSF Magazine

If Anti-Seizure Meds Don’t Work for Epilepsy, Can Surgery Help?

Vikram Rao, director of the UCSF Epilepsy Center, discusses why a third of seizure patients don’t respond to medication and the promising new surgical and technological treatments available.

These Cells Have Hidden Powers That Could Heal Brain Injuries

UCSF scientists discovered that an overlooked cell type in the brain plays a central role in healing traumatic brain injury. Understanding how it does this will lead to treatments for injuries that currently have only minimal interventions.

Novel Therapy Aims to Make Type 1 Diabetes Patients Insulin Free

UCSF Health transplant specialists recently performed an innovative, minimally invasive pancreatic islet transplant designed to enable a patient with Type 1 diabetes to become insulin independent.

The patient received insulin-producing islets created in a laboratory and derived from stem cells of an individual with the same blood type. While UCSF Health is internationally known for islet transplantation, the islets have previously come from deceased donor pancreases.

Starve Tumors? How to Kill Cancer by Cutting Off Its Energy Supply

Thanks to funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), UC San Francisco researchers are revolutionizing what we thought we knew about how cancer spreads, opening new paths to cures.

Study Assesses Cancers in Children Exposed to Medical Imaging

A study led by UCSF and UC Davis concluded that radiation from medical imaging is associated with a higher risk of blood cancers in children.

Danger: Pesticides Raise Death Risk 60% for Kids with Leukemia

A new study from UCSF is the first to show a statistically significant increased risk of death in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia exposed to any pesticide during or after pregnancy.

Can CRISPR Fix a Childhood Brain Disorder?

A study using CRISPR restored brain connectivity and made the brain more resilient to seizures, which are often seen in a form of severe autism.

Vizient Gives UCSF Health High Marks for Patient Care Excellence

UCSF Health has been recognized as a top performer in the 2025 Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Ranking by Vizient, Inc., one of the nation’s largest provider-driven health care performance improvement companies. UCSF Health has received this honor for four consecutive years.

UCSF Awarded $12M Research Grant to Improve Cancer Outcomes

The UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center announced today the awarding of a Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for a combined program focused on cancer outcomes. The program will receive $12 million over five years to improve cancer health outcomes across populations by investigating the interplay of tumor biology with individual risk factors and external drivers of health.

Repurposing a Diabetes Medication to Prime CAR T Cancer Targets

Urothelial carcinoma (UC) is the second most common genitourinary cancer, leading to over 16,000 deaths a year in the U.S. Despite recent advances, the five-year survival rate for metastatic UC remains around 5% to 10%.