1. < Message from the Chair

Last Thursday, we hosted our annual UCLA Department of Medicine Research Day, which by any measure was a resounding success.

As I reflect on the outstanding work shared and connections made at this year’s Research Day, I would like to reiterate our department’s commitment to scholarship. We are a leading academic department of medicine; research is a core part of our mission and will continue to be. Our goal as a department is to change lives, to change medicine and to be on the leading edge of innovations in medicine and health. Many of the things we take for granted now, in 2025, did not exist 10 years ago. This speaks to the fact that we need to continue to push the envelope, to chase after questions, and to be driven by curiosity because we all believe that there is a future that is better than the now. That is why we do what we do as researchers. We will always be stronger together particularly as we seek out opportunities to collaborate and support each other. There is much that we have left to do, as we continue to Lead in Innovation, Transform Care and Advance Health for All. 

Research Day Reminds Us of the Power of Science — and Community

Research Day is always an exciting day for the department of medicine (DoM). This year, it also served to reconnect us with our sense of purpose and as a moment of reprieve from the roller coaster of federal funding challenges that have loomed large in our minds since January. It was a day to celebrate each other's accomplishments and to seek out collaborations that could lead to the next breakthrough in science and medicine. 

The conference started with breakout sessions, during which scientists with special interests in basic science, health services research or clinical trials gathered in small groups to network, learn and discuss solutions to challenges in their field. The basic science session focused on our  faculty’s exciting research on the endothelium, the thin layer of cells that coats blood vessels throughout the body. Conversations in the health services research session focused on new developments in the identification and care of people with dementia and cognitive impairment. Participants in the clinical trials session brainstormed strategies to launch more trials in the DoM and obtain the resources necessary to build out this vital sector of our work. 

There were 325 participants in this year’s Research Day and 115 poster presentations. Sixty-five volunteer judges helped select  from the large number of outstanding posters, first, second, and third place winners from four categories: basic science, translational research, clinical research and health services research. Our judges had their work cut out for them — every one of our scientists is doing high-impact research, from developing drugs to prevent peanut allergies, to hunting for new ways to treat HIV, to learning how rural health care providers can better serve the needs of LGBTQ+ patients, and much more. 

As we await the results of this year’s poster competition, here are a few standouts:  

A Cheaper, Reusable Artery-On-A-Chip 

Organ-on-a-chip technology has been heralded as an alternative to animal models, which circumvents ethical concerns about animal research and in some instances might more closely model the human condition.   However, some types of chips — such as arteries-on-a-chip — are not readily available, as they can be prohibitively expensive to purchase or too resource-intensive to make. 

“I really like this project. I feel like it has a lot of applications to things and diseases that people do suffer from,” Saara said. "I think being able to just have an impact through the kind of research we do here is very valuable.” 

A Link Between Testosterone Supplements and Renal Cell Carcinoma 

As interest in potential roles for testosterone for men’s health and longevity continues to grow, testosterone supplements are becoming more common for both gym-goers and those who seek to maintain their health as they age. However, a study from a team led by Alexandra Drakaki, MD, PhD suggests that testosterone supplements could perpetuate cancer in men with clear cell renal cell carcinoma, a type of kidney cancer. Physician and research fellow Dimitrios Stefanoudakis, MD offered an overview of this data during Research Day, showing how the team took a clinical observation and found a potential mechanism of action — a demonstration of clinical translational research in action.  

“The idea is that this information helps us personalize the treatment plan,” Dr. Stefanoudakis said. “For patients with this subtype of cancer and symptoms of hypogonadism, it should lead to discussions around alternatives to testosterone supplements such as regular exercise, stress management, and other lifestyle modifications or medical management strategies.” 

High Deductible Health Plans are a Barrier to Bariatric Surgery Access 

Despite the popularity of weight loss drugs like Wegovy, bariatric surgery remains the obesity intervention with the most data to support its success. However, it is highly cost-prohibitive, often exceeding $20,000 without insurance even before accounting for the additional medical appointments required to ensure that a patient is fit for the operation. It is well-documented that obesity rates are higher among people of lower socioeconomic status, a population that is also more likely to suffer from obesity related diseases such as Type 2 diabetes. The proportion of this population with high-deductible health insurance plans (HDHPs), which do not cover a patient’s medical costs until they reach a certain threshold (the deductible), is growing. This can be as high as $12,000 for some plans, and employers are increasingly turning to HDHPs to cut costs. 

As I reflect on the outstanding work shared and connections made at this year’s Research Day, I would like to reiterate our department’s commitment to scholarship. We are a leading academic department of medicine; research is a core part of our mission and will continue to be. Our goal as a department is to change lives, to change medicine, to be on the leading edge of medicine. Many of the things we take for granted now, in 2025, did not exist 10 years ago. This speaks to the fact that we need to continue to push the envelope, to chase after questions, and to be driven by curiosity because we all believe that there is a future that is better than the now. That is why we do what we do as researchers. We will always be stronger together and will seek out opportunities to collaborate and support each other. There is much that we have left to do.  

Please join me in extending an enormous thank you to the many staff and the faculty members on the organizing committee, as well as our judges for the poster session. Your work is imperative to the department’s success, and we could not do it without you! Also, a reminder: We will have a research faculty community meeting on Oct. 28 from 5:00 to 7:30 PM in Geffen Hall, Room B26. I look forward to continuing our conversation about how we can excel in our research mission then.  

Research Day Plenary Speakers Share Science

Our roster of plenary speakers at this year's DoM Research Day spanned a wide realm of basic, translational, clinical research and implementation science. Here is an overview of what they shared.

Richard K. Leuchter, MD 

Dr. Leuchter is a hospitalist based at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center (RRMC) and UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center. He focused his plenary lecture on exciting data from a six-month randomized controlled trial on the efficacy of the UCLA Next Day Clinic (NDC), a program he helped create and launch in July 2023 at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center and expanded to RRMC the following year. Although the findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, they are promising so far: For every referral to the NDC, patients spent an average of about four fewer days in the hospital (also known as “hospital bed days”). With more than 225 referrals to date, the NDC has avoided 980 hospital bed-days and over 5,000 ED boarding hours. Compared to the control group (hospitalization as usual), the NDC avoids $12,950 in health care expenditures per referral, totaling to $2.9 million in avoided health care expenditures since inception.

From Dr. Leuchter’s perspective, the NDC establishes a rare “win-win-win" scenario in medicine: patients, the health system and payors all benefit. Patients get to stay out of the hospital instead of sitting for hours waiting for a free bed, surrounded by other sick people. The health system can keep beds free for more complex cases, like transplants. Payors only have to cover 1 to 3 ambulatory visits to the NDC instead of expensive hospital stays — a substantially cheaper exchange. 

“Really, every single person involved in the health care ecosystem benefits from this model,” Dr. Leuchter said.  

It will likely be several months before the results of the trial are officially published. Meanwhile, Dr. Leuchter and his team are looking for ways to use their model to strengthen our ambulatory care system by giving primary care providers, cardiologists and other specialists the ability to refer patients to the NDC rather than sending them to the ER. They are also looking to add more conditions to the list of those that qualify for NDC care; the pilot phase included heart failure, pneumonia, cellulitis, syncope, acute kidney injury, pyelonephritis, and osteomyelitis. New ones could include outpatient IV therapies for additional infections and anemia, along with other conditions that present frequently to both ER physicians and PCPs.  

“Given all the stressors impacting our health care system, we need to innovate ways to increase the resilience of our health system and develop practical alternatives to hospitalization,” Dr. Leuchter explained. “So, the next step for us is to enable better acute care in the ambulatory setting by opening up the NDC to more providers and developing novel remote patient monitoring platforms assisted by AI.” 

Kara Chew, MD, MS 

Dr. Chew is a physician-scientist at the UCLA Center for Clinical AIDS Research and Education, where she studies potential treatments for HIV cure. Her plenary speech focused on the findings from a recent exploratory clinical trial conducted by her and collaborators at University of California – San Francisco examining the immune system’s response to a therapeutic vaccine against HIV. She also shared the rationale and design of a recently launched trial to test a strategy to make better preventative vaccines.

At a fundamental level, the therapeutic vaccine Dr. Chew tested in the clinical trial is designed to stimulate the immune system’s response (specifically, the T cell response) to an HIV antigen called group-specific antigen, or Gag. These immune responses have been seen to be crucial in the few people who naturally control HIV. The PENNVAX study team wanted to see whether adding another HIV antigen — the HIV envelope protein — was helpful or detrimental immune response to the vaccine. Working with a group of participants who had been diagnosed with HIV for nearly 20 years, on average, they found that while the vaccine was effective in stimulating the immune system’s response to Gag, adding the envelope protein seemed to mute the response.   

“What we learned from that is that likely any therapeutic vaccine for HIV should not include envelope in it, at least given at the same time as Gag, because it distracts somehow from the important Gag responses we're trying to elicit,” Dr. Chew said.  

This work will inform the design of future HIV vaccines and clinical trials. Meanwhile, Dr. Chew also presented some proof-of-concept pre-clinical data on a second vaccine she and collaborators at the University of California – Davis and University of California – San Francisco are studying in a new clinical trial called CONTENDER. This vaccine is not focused on HIV and instead uses a COVID-19 immunogen. It is designed to make stronger and longer-lasting immune responses by another arm of the immune system – B cells, which produce antibodies r. It works by strengthening the body’s T cell help response, ideally making the immune system better at generating antibodies against any number of infections a vaccine is targeting. 

“Besides assessing safety, the theme of the work I'm doing is using vaccines to generate better- bigger and longer lasting-and specific responses to whatever antigen or infection we're trying to target,” Dr. Chew said.  

Dr. Chew was a fellow in the Specialty Training and Advanced Research Program, which she credits with giving her the flexibility to advance her career as a clinical researcher with a translational focus. She believes the UCLA Department of Medicine is a great place to be a physician-scientist because it is so supportive in terms of mentorship and resources, including those needed to launch FDA-regulated investigational new drug trials like the ones she works on.   

“I feel like we’re in constant learning mode, and it feels very collaborative and very positive,” she said.  

To Dr. Chew, DoM Research Day is important to fostering community. Our department is teeming with opportunities for collaboration just waiting to be explored.  

“Research Day is really helpful to see what projects are being done that might align with your own or open up new avenues for work,” Dr. Chew said.  

Marla D. Lipsyc-Sharf, MD 

Dr. Lipsyc-Sharf is a breast oncologist and translational researcher based in Encino and Santa Monica who aims to address the problem of breast cancer recurrence, when early-stage breast cancer spreads, or metastasizes, to other organs despite successful initial treatment. She gave Research Day attendees an overview of her research on “liquid biopsies” for breast cancer, a type of blood test that looks for circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) to predict the presence of minimal residual disease (MRD), a risk factor for recurrence. While commercial liquid biopsies are already in use for breast cancer patients, the typical approach is still to look for metastasis with routine physical exams — though these may not catch the signs until it is too late.  

Looking ahead, Dr. Lipsyc-Sharf hopes to use these findings to refine liquid biopsy technology and launch clinical trials in which data from the tests is used to determine when to initiate treatment — and whether ctDNA liquid biopsies really do have an impact on survival. One study she is currently leading at UCLA, called MIRI, will provide critical information on this front. A second study, titled I-SURV, will look at how the tests impact patients’ anxiety, fear of cancer recurrence and overall quality of life. It will provide critical information on this front.

Dr. Lipsyc-Sharf believes the DoM is the right place for her work because it provides two of the most important things in research: mentorship and collaboration.  

“I am so grateful to have outstanding research mentors here that have made practice-changing contributions to the field of breast cancer treatment,” Dr. Lipsyc-Sharf said. “As we see firsthand at DoM Research Day, the UCLA DoM has physician-scientists in truly every discipline that are committed to improving our understanding and treatment of disease. I am eager to continue learning from and collaborating with some of these brilliant physicians both in my own division and in others.”  

Hrishikesh S. Kulkarni, MD, MSCI

Dr. Kulkarni is a pulmonologist and critical care physician who holds the Dr. Allan J. Swartz and Roslyn Holt Swartz Women’s Lung Health Endowed Chair at DGSOM. His plenary talk centered on data from his research on the role of the complement system — a group of proteins in the immune response — in lung injury, a major cause of death during the COVID-19 pandemic and a common cause of death in the ICU. 

“Being at UCLA gives you an avenue to accelerate this process at a much faster rate than you would if you did not have the resources we have here,” he noted.  He added that events like Research Day are essential for progress.

“By celebrating the research and hard work everybody is doing within the DoM, we communicate a very strong message that the department is supporting trainees and faculty, and that regardless of the stressors around us, that research is a priority for the university, school and the department,” he said. “This creates a level of enthusiasm that is infectious — it not only supports current members of our department but also helps us recruit trainees as well as others who are interested in joining us as we work towards our mission.” 

Thank you to all of our outstanding plenary speakers for sharing your inspiring work!

Latest Latino GDP Report from David E. Hayes-Bautista, PhD Makes Economic Case for Accessible Health Care

September 15 through October 15 is Latinx Heritage Month. This annual observance is especially meaningful in Los Angeles County, where the Latino or Hispanic population is the largest racial group and makes up nearly half of the population, according to 2020 Census data. Their presence is a fundamental part of the local economy and is a growing part of the national one, as medical sociologist David E. Hayes-Bautista, PhD, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, told his audience during a special presentation on Oct. 6 of new data from the U.S. Latino GDP Report. He is one of the four authors of the report, which is published annually through a collaboration between the center for the study of Latino health and culture and California Lutheran University. The presentation, titled “Powering Progress: Latinos Propel Growth of California’s World-Leading Economy,” was held for a general audience in commemoration of Latinx Heritage Month through a collaboration between the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California and the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at DGSOM.

Dr. Hayes-Bautista argues that as long as policies are in place that would deport the Latino immigrant workforce or reduce access to health care — such as those that defund Medi-Cal, take health care away from undocumented immigrants and cut funding to rural hospitals that serve Latino populations — the state and national GDP are at risk of contraction.  

“We are arresting, detaining and deporting those who are most likely to work,” Dr. Hayes-Bautista said. “You have to think, economically, does this make sense?” 

Secondly, Dr. Hayes-Bautista urged listeners to vote for politicians who have committed to protecting the health of Latinos and immigrants.  

“You may think that because you’re just one vote, it doesn’t matter, but yes, it does matter,” he said. “When you have the vote, things change.”  

Dr. Hayes-Bautista’s advocacy for members of the Latinx community is clear. As we recognize Hispanic Heritage month, it is important for us  to acknowledge the extent to which our region is shaped by the contributions of a large segment of our community, in the amazing tapestry that is LA and Southern California!

Dale

P.S.

One of the things that I noticed at research day, was the participation of trainees, including UCLA undergraduates who leverage the incredible opportunities to work in the labs of many of our outstanding faculty. We took a picture of the Abel Lab at Research Day.  Among the smiling faces, 4 are UCLA undergraduates and one is a high school senior!

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