When growing cells in the lab, researchers routinely add antibiotics to prevent contamination. But a new study by UC San Francisco researchers raises a red flag against this standard practice, finding that it can induce unintentional genetic changes in the cells and distort test results. These changes may be especially concerning in pharmacogenomics experiments looking at how human cells respond to drugs, an important part of precision medic...

At UCSF's 3D Imaging Lab, radiologist Judy Yee, MD, pulls up an image that looks more like a birthday party balloon animal than a patient's colon: a vibrant, color-segmented tube, torqued and twisted in on itself. Created from thin slices of a CT scan, the image appears in 3D on the flat screen. It can even morph into video "fly-through" views, enhancing polyps, lesions, and other precancerous anomalies.

A team of cancer researchers led by scientists at UC San Francisco and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center demonstrated in human cells and mouse models that a first-of-its-kind hybrid drug can outsmart drug-resistant cancers. The drug physically yokes together two existing drugs against a common cancer pathway into a single molecule, generating a double-blow that blocked the resistance cancer cells otherwise develop to either drug on its own.

A team of 27 robots are zooming around the hallways of the new University of California, San Francisco hospital at Mission Bay. They look a bit like R2D2, dragging a platform around behind them. Instead of drones, think of them more as little flatbed trucks, ferrying carts of stuff around the vast hospital complex - food, linens, medications, medical waste and garbage. And they do it more efficiently than humans.

Last summer, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley spent two months playing video games. For five days a week, he played Meditrain - which involves meditation and was developed in collaboration with Zynga - on his iPad, and another called Rhythmicity, which he developed with Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead, and Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation. "It's based on the hypothesis that our brain is a rhythmic machine," Gazzaley says.