News & Events: Tissue Regeneration

Surgeon-scientist Tammy T. Chang, MD, PhD, principal investigator in the The Chang Laboratory for Liver Tissue Engineering, has been awarded grants by two prestigious federal funders of research, the NASA Space Biology Program, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS).  Dr. Chang is a gastrointestinal surgeon who takes care of patients primarily in an acute care setting.  She holds an appointment as an assistant professor in the Division of General Surgery. Dr. Chang's research is focused on microgravity as it [...]

UCSF News Reports on a novel surgical approach to transplanting cells into diseased organs developed by Tammy T. Chang, MD, PhD, a gastrointestinal and acute care surgeon and principal investigator in the The Chang Laboratory for Liver Tissue Engineering, and Boris Rubinsky, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. The technique is called irreversible electroporation, or IRE, and enables newly transplanted clusters of liver cells, or hepatocytes to thrive and proliferate in a mouse liver. The research, reported in the May issue of the journal BioTechniques, could one day [...]

The UCSF Division of General Surgery announces the launch of a new website for The Chang Laboratory for Liver Tissue Engineering. Tissue engineering and regeneration are the next evolutionary step in surgical practice. The lab's goal is to make significant contributions to bringing regenerative surgical therapies from the lab into the operating room. The lab focuses on a complex and vital solid organ, the liver to address the great clinical need to develop alternative therapies for end stage liver disease, currently treated by liver transplantation and severely limited by the shortage of [...]

UCSF News reports on new research of the Pomerantz Lab suggesting that future efforts to regrow or regenerate human tissue may require blocking the activity of a tumor-suppressor gene, ARF. The research involved adding the human ARF gene to a zebrafish, which prevented its normal ability to regenerate tissue, here the fish's tail fin that had been cut off. The research was led by Jason Pomerantz, MD, Associate Professor of Surgery in the Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Surgical Director of the UCSF Craniofacial Center, and Director of the Pomerantz Lab. The lead author on the [...]