As UCSF launches a 10-week campaign to promote organ donation, medical center staff and former patients reflect on their own life-changing transplant experiences.

Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, of the UCSF-affiliated Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease and Kyoto University, has won the 2009 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his discovery of a method of reprogramming adult skin cells to become embryonic-like stem cells. Yamanaka, who is the L.K. Whittier Investigator in Stem Cell Biology at Gladstone and professor of anatomy at UCSF, is one of the youngest recipients of the award, which is one of the highest scientific honors bestowed in the United States.

UCSF researchers have genetically encoded mouse cells to respond to light, creating cells that can be trained to follow a light beam or stop on command like microscopic robots.

A joint UCSF-SFSU program for postdocs has received nearly $300,000 in economic stimulus funds, allowing administrators to extend four current fellowships and add one more.

The UCSF School of Dentistry is projecting a 20 percent cut in state funding or more than $2.6 million of almost $14 million in state funding, according to Dean John Featherstone.

UCSF leaders, a patient advocate who is a member of the board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and construction workers will gather for a “topping off” ceremony to celebrate the placement of the last structural steel beam on the building that will be the headquarters for The Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCSF.

UCSF researchers are set to begin a Phase I clinical trial in collaboration with StemCells, Inc. to test the safety and preliminary effectiveness of using neural stem cells to treat children with a rare, fatal form of a brain disorder known as Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease (PMD). Currently, there are no effective treatments for the fatal forms of the disease, which affects males that inherit a single defective gene.