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Cancer

More than one million Americans are diagnosed with cancer each year – and nearly one in four dies from the disease. At UCSF, these sobering facts are only part of an evolving story: advances in our understanding of cancer are providing new and personalized therapies that stave off the disease, improve quality of life and offer hope for our patients. Your gift to the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center makes it possible for our talented experts to conduct the studies that will lead to new and improved treatments and therapies.

HIGHLIGHTS

Cancer at UCSF

At the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, we treat and investigate all forms of cancer. As we research each distinct type of cancer, we seek ways to tailor treatment to every individual. With your support we are revolutionizing the delivery of cancer care.

The center consolidates the work of clinicians and researchers who are dedicated to four fundamental pursuits:

  • Sensitive, leading-edge patient care
  • Laboratory research into the causes and events of cancer's progression
  • Clinical research to translate new knowledge into viable treatments
  • Population research that can lead to prevention, early detection, and quality-of-life improvement for those living with cancer

UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Research Building

Generous philanthropic support made it possible for us to build this state-of-the-art facility, where UCSF researchers are altering the course of cancer by making discoveries that translate into new treatments and cures. Opened on the 57-acre Mission Bay biomedical campus in June 2009, the building houses scientists investigating:

  • Cancer's basic biological mechanisms
  • Brain tumors
  • Cancer population sciences
  • Computational biology
  • Pediatric oncology
  • Urologic oncology

Uniting these researchers in one place for the first time is fueling unprecedented productivity. The proximity of talented scientists studying the disease from many perspectives is fostering a rich cross-pollination of ideas that will lead to new techniques to prevent, diagnose and treat cancer.

To increase our capacity to explore enterprising ideas and bring promising new therapies into practice, we need to provide space for our programs to expand. With your support, we will complete the fourth floor of the building and continue to conduct this kind of high risk, high reward research.

Cancer Hospital

Also on our Mission Bay campus, UCSF is building a new world-class hospital explicitly for cancer patients. It will be the one of the key clinical locations where our doctors translate the findings of our scientists – at work across the street in the UCSF Helen Diller Family Cancer Research Building – into therapies and cures for the good of patients.

The cancer hospital is part of a new $1.6 billion UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay scheduled to break ground in 2014. Your gifts to this ambitious project will allow UCSF to build on its stature as a nationally recognized Comprehensive Cancer Center and a world leader in cancer treatment.

SELECT ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • Lists Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn, PhD, among the faculty; Blackburn won the prize for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and telomerase; her research sparked a whole field of inquiry into treating cancer as well as cardiovascular, neurodegenerative and age-related diseases
  • Received the prestigious designation of "comprehensive" for the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center from the National Cancer Institute (NCI)
  • Ranked eighth among the nation's hospitals for cancer care and first among California cancer-care providers by U.S. News & World Report
  • Home of the Nobel Prize-winning work of J. Michael Bishop, MD, and Harold Varmus, MD, who discovered cancer-causing oncogenes; their work opened new doors for exploring genetic mistakes that cause cancer, and formed the basis for some of the most important cancer research happening today
  • Ranked first in California and sixth nationwide in NCI research grants

"Armed with new insights into the molecular basis of cancer, UCSF scientists are pursuing some of the most innovative and exciting research happening today. Advances from this work could lead to earlier detections, improved drug therapies, and, ultimately, to a dramatic increase in survival rates and quality of life." - Frank McCormick, PhD, FRS, UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center director, David A. Wood Distinguished Professorship of Tumor Biology and Cancer Research, E. Dixon Heise Distinguished Professorship in Oncology

For more information on supporting Cancer at UCSF, please contact Suzanne Teer at steer@support.ucsf.edu or 415/476-3622.