Largest Campaign Focused Exclusively on Driving Innovation in Medicine
Press Release – UC San Francisco (UCSF) has announced the public phase of one of the largest fundraising efforts ever by a U.S. university, a $5 billion campaign aimed at tackling the most complex biomedical questions of our day and working more broadly to improve the quality of people’s health over their lifetimes.
The campaign, which makes its public launch with $3 billion raised, will focus on three “Grand Challenges:” solving fundamental biological mysteries; accelerating the translation of discoveries to transform patient care; and working with organizations and institutions to achieve greater health equity for all.
The boldness of the goal, said UCSF Chancellor Sam Hawgood, reflects the potential to tap the confluence of biomedicine and technology in the highly innovative ecosystem of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Every couple of centuries, he said, a convergence of factors give rise to a significant advance in knowledge. Today, factors are coming together to allow this to happen in the health sciences, with the emergence of big data, software and hardware, combined with the knowledge that’s been gained in molecular biology.
‘We are facing a time of unprecedented opportunity, as well as tremendous need, in human health and equity that cannot be solved by individuals working in isolation,” said Hawgood. “This campaign brings together brilliant minds in science and technology, within the context of our region’s pioneering spirit, to solve the most challenging and vexing problems in human health.”
The first of the three Grand Challenges, “Decoding Life to Improve Health,” is aimed at illuminating the complex biology of human beings, using discoveries made at the molecular, cellular and circuitry levels to fight diseases or stop them before they start. Current examples at UCSF include the work of Wendell Lim, PhD, who is engineering “self-driving” cells from a person’s own immune system to kill cancer and other diseases, and Susanna Rosi, PhD, and Peter Walter, PhD, who are studying an experimental drug – discovered in Walter’s lab – that, when tested in mice, completely reversed severe learning and memory impairments caused by traumatic brain injury.
“Thanks to unprecedented advances in technology, we are at a historic moment in our ability to understand the mysteries of life,” said infectious disease researcher Joseph DeRisi, PhD, professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF and co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, who is using next-generation sequencing to pinpoint the genomic signatures of pathogens, creating a single, rapid test to diagnose infections.. “At UCSF, we can develop and refine answers and harness solutions that will help transform our understanding of human health and disease.”
The second challenge, “Leveraging Discovery to Revolutionize Care,” aims to translate discoveries – moving them from basic-science labs to clinical trials and into health care settings – faster and more effectively than ever before. This will include capitalizing on advances in technology and partnerships with industry leaders, such as Sanofi and GE. Atul Butte, MD, PhD, inaugural director of the UCSF Institute for Computational Health Sciences and the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor, for one, will leverage high-performance computing resources and access to more than 15 million UC Health electronic health records – representing health, genetic, lifestyle and environmental data from California’s highly diverse population – to identify causes and new treatment strategies for diseases and identify ways to improve health care quality and delivery by hospitals.
The third challenge, “Partnering to Achieve Health Equity,” applies UCSF’s scientific rigor to tackle socially determined obstacles to health, such as poverty and discrimination. Current efforts include the San Francisco Cancer Initiative (SF CAN) and the Child Equity Institute, which address the social and economic factors that impact health. A heightened focus on equity in mental health care is being led in part by Matthew State, MD, PhD, chair of the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and an effort to address the challenges of fighting chronic diseases in disadvantaged and underserved populations is being led by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, PhD, MD, MAS, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and inaugural vice dean for population health and health equity at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
“UCSF is a national leader, and its collaborative, entrepreneurial spirit makes it uniquely suited to address the greatest challenges in health for individuals and populations,” said William E. Oberndorf, chair of the UCSF Board of Overseers and chairman of Oberndorf Enterprises.
About UCSF: UCSF is a unique campus of the University of California system, dedicated exclusively to graduate- and professional-level health sciences. It receives more research funding from the National Institutes of Health than any other public university in the nation, and the second most among all US universities. UCSF’s health system, UCSF Health, includes UCSF Medical Center, ranked fifth in the nation by US News & World Report, and the highly-ranked UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland. UCSF’s graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing, and pharmacy are among the top-ranked in the nation, as is its graduate program, which offers doctoral degrees in a range of biomedical fields. For more information, please visit www.ucsf.edu/news.
