The UCSF Program in Prenatal and Pediatric Genome Sequencing (P3EGS) studies the utility of whole exome sequencing as a tool for 1) diagnosing infants and children with serious developmental disorders, and, 2) providing genetic information to parents when a prenatal study reveals a fetus with a structural anomaly. The team is also addressing ethical, social and economic issues in the delivery of genomic sequencing results to diverse populations, such as under represented minorities and the medically underserved.

In 2010, in collaboration with the San Francisco Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we established the NIH-funded San Francisco POstmortem Systematic InvesTigation of Sudden Cardiac Death (POST SCD) Study, a first of its kind partnership between cardiac electrophysiology specialists and the County Medical Examiner to perform comprehensive autopsies for every incident out-of-hospital sudden death within the County of San Francisco meeting WHO criteria. We collect and review all antemortem medical history to recreate that individual's composite past medical history, and integrate these data with paramedic runsheets, toxicology, autopsy, and histology results. A panel of two cardiologists, two pathologists, a neurologist, an HIV expert (as needed), and a pediatric cardiologist (as needed), then adjudicate underlying causes for all SCDs. These rigorous investigations of nearly every incident SCD in an entire metropolitan area represent the most comprehensive study of its kind on the epidemiology and underlying causes of SCD.

The San Francisco Cancer Initiative (SF CAN) is a collaborative effort to reduce cancer in San Francisco by engaging health care systems, government, community leaders, and residents. SF CAN focuses on five (breast, coloreactal, liver, prostate and tobacco related) of the city’s most common cancers likely to be affected by known interventions or better screening. Since many of those cancers affect certain racial and ethnic minorities and the socially disadvantaged more than other groups, a primary focus of SF CAN aim to reduce inequities in prevention, screening rates, access to quality healthcare, and outcomes.

SPOKE (Scalable Precision Medicine Oriented Knowledge Engine) demonstrates the greater Knowledge Network that is at the core of UCSF Precision Medicine. SPOKE offers a graph-theoretic database that will allow researchers to explore these interconnected pathways, enabling new discoveries. SPOKE pulls data out of silos, connecting the wealth of information that already exists from basic molecular research, clinical insights, environmental data and others. It mirrors the very nature of biomedical and health pathways, with millions of entity types including gene, protein, organ, disease condition, drug compounds and side effects – built up from dozens of reference repositories as well as from UCSF clinical evidence.

This trans-disciplinary program is designed to improve understanding and treatment of patients with congenital anomalies and pregnancy complications. The program aims to integrate existing demographic, epidemiological, social, environmental, clinical and biomarker data in an effort to predict risk of adverse outcomes and response to treatment. By doing so, the program will create stronger bridges between basic research and clinical applications, and improve maternal, fetal and neonatal care.

Wynton is a large, shared high-performance compute (HPC) cluster underlying UCSF’s Research Computing Capability. Funded and administered cooperatively by UCSF campus IT and key research groups, it is available to all UCSF researchers, and consists of different profiles suited to various biomedical and health science computing needs. Researchers can participate using the “co-op” model of resource contribution and sharing.

The NINDS-funded, multicenter Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) study aims to change the fact that advances in understanding the pathophysiology of TBI have not yet translated into a single successful clinical trial or treatment. The team is collecting and analyzing detailed clinical data on subjects at 18 U.S. sites, across the injury spectrum, along with CT/MRI imaging, blood biospecimens, and detailed clinical outcomes.

Since its inception in 2015, the Biospecimen Resource Program (BIOS) has been dedicated to providing infrastructure, services, and training to support research requiring biospecimens. We provide end-to-end support of the full biospecimen life cycle, including broad future-use sampling, assay-specific optimization, cold-chain logistics, and compliance and regulatory expertise. BIOS offers the next-generation of resources and tools for electronically consenting participants and tracking all EHR data and transomic annotations relevant to the biospecimens in a central virtual ecosystem.

The UCSF Center for Next-Gen Precision Diagnostics (NGDx) pioneers the development of novel technologies for diagnosing mysterious illnesses. An assay to detect all potential pathogens is now clinically available for diagnosis of neurological infections in acutely ill hospitalized patients.

The UCSF Health Atlas, a new (as of Spring 2020), interactive population health mapping website that curates publicly available data and visualizes it at the census tract level. The UCSF Health Atlas  which will enable researchers to explore neighborhood-level characteristics and see how they relate, also includes regularly updated information on COVID-19 cases and deaths in California. In an effort to encourage UCSF researchers to consider population health principles in their research, education, and clinical care, Health Atlas includes data at the census tract and county level for over 100 contextual characteristics across California. 

Women Informed to Screen Depending on Measures of Risk (WISDOM) is a five-year study that tests two different approaches to breast cancer screening – annual mammography vs. a personalized, risk-based approach. The goal is to determine whether personalized screening is as safe, effective and accepted compared to annual screening. Our personalized screening approach takes multiple risk factors into consideration, including genetic markers, to determine how frequently someone should be screened by mammogram. Over time, we can learn which of these risk factors are most important and continue to adapt our screening recommendations accordingly. This is a UC Health, system-wide study.