When Ramon Birnbaum, PhD, came to UCSF three years ago to do his postdoctoral work on the role of genetic regulation in human disease in the lab of School of Pharmacy faculty member Nadav Ahituv, PhD, epilepsy was barely on his radar.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, Sharon Stone, Kathleen Sebelius, Bill Gates and Elton John are a few of the headliners to speak this week at AIDS 2012, the XIX International AIDS Conference, which runs through July 27 in Washington, D.C.

A UCSF team has harnessed a natural protein in bacteria to create a “pause switch” in immune cells, potentially leading to more effective and safer immune therapies for diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis.

Population-wide levels of HIV virus dropped substantially between 2011 and May 2012 in a rural part of southwestern Uganda, the site of two community health campaigns led by doctors at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center (SFGH) and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.