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.  

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.

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%.