About UCSF

mission bay drone shot
Matt Beardsley

The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is an ideal home base for The Kidney Project.

  • UCSF includes an impressive biomedical research enterprise, four premier health sciences schools, a graduate division, and a medical center that is a leader in medical innovation and has one of the top 10 hospitals in the United States.

  • UCSF Medical Center has performed more kidney transplants than any other institution in the world—more than 8,000 since 1964—and is the fifth-largest center for living-donor kidney transplants in the country.

  • Through its Office of Innovation, Technology and Alliances, UCSF seeks and fosters partnerships with industry that will result in products that improve health.

UCSF aggressively promotes science and academic programs that support the translation of science into patient care.

  • Discovery and patient care are core components of UCSF’s mission.

  • UCSF is home to the Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at UCSF, which was one of the first 12 academic institutions selected to be part of the National Institutes of Health’s national clinical and translational science consortium. The consortium has a charter to transform clinical and translational research to ensure that the best health solutions get to patients as quickly as possible.

In addition, UCSF is known worldwide as an institution that attacks biomedical problems with the kind of interdisciplinary zeal required to carry forward an effort as bold as The Kidney Project. As examples:

  • The California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) at UCSF was created by the State of California to accelerate discovery and innovation. Faculty affiliates at three University of California campuses work to harness physics and engineering to unify our understanding of biological systems and to translate academic research into products and services that benefit society. Kidney Project Director Shuvo Roy is a QB3 UCSF faculty affiliate, and his laboratory is located in the QB3 building.

  • The UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences (BTS) is a one-of-a-kind department that brings together computing, engineering, and therapeutic sciences to find new ways of diagnosing disease and of treating disease with medicines and medical devices. Engineering resources at UCSF are further strengthened through the BTS department’s joint bioengineering graduate program with the University of California, Berkeley. This is Roy’s home department.

  • The UCSF School of Pharmacy, which co-administers the BTS department, has among its key strategic goals the creation of new research tools through the application of nanoscience and the formation of fresh collaborations with new partners in academia, government, and industry.