Feb 15, 2013

James Lightwood, PhD

California tobacco control efforts that cost $2.4 billion over nearly two decades reduced health care costs during that same period by $134 billion, according to a new study co-authored by UCSF School of Pharmacy faculty member James Lightwood, PhD.

“These health care cost savings began to appear almost immediately after the program started and have grown over time, reaching more than $25 billion a year in 2008,” said Lightwood, a faculty member in the School’s Department of Clinical Pharmacy.

The California program combining aggressive anti-smoking ads with community programs started after voters passed Proposition 99 in 1988, which increased cigarette taxes by 25 cents per pack to fund it.

The new study, published in the online journal, PLOS ONE, updates an earlier one with an additional five years of data and a more sophisticated economic analysis.

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California’s Tobacco Control Program Generates Huge Health Care Savings

Feb 15, 2013

Ryan Hernandez, PhD

Ryan Hernandez, PhD, whose lab studies patterns of genetic variation from populations around the world, using detailed computer modeling to learn more about human evolutionary processes and to discover regions of the genome vital to function and underlying disease, has been named a 2013 Alfred P. Sloan Research fellow.

The prestigious two-year fellowships provide $50,000 in funding and “seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.” The Sloan Foundation supports science, technology, and economic institutions.

Hernandez is a faculty member in the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, a joint department of the UCSF Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, and is also affiliated with the Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) and the Institute for Human Genetics.

Feb 13, 2013

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Faculty of the UCSF School of Pharmacy will train Safeway supermarket pharmacists to help their customers quit smoking, using a curriculum originally developed at the School.

The new partnership with Safeway Inc. marks the first time a smoking cessation intervention has been applied systematically across a network of pharmacies.

Under the program, the School will train pharmacists based at 20 California supermarkets in a streamlined version of Rx for Change, the tobacco-cessation curriculum created by faculty in the School’s Department of Clinical Pharmacy to guide health care providers nationwide in evidence-based clinical interventions to help patients quiet smoking.

The initiative includes a three-month study by School researchers to assess the impact of trained pharmacists in stores enacting an “Ask, Advise, Refer” model—screening for smoking when filling prescriptions, advising customers on medications to help them quit, and referring them to a helpline.

The project is expected to expand over the coming year to include hundreds of Safeway pharmacies across the country.

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UCSF-Safeway Pharmacy Alliance Aims to Help Customers Quit Smoking

Feb 12, 2013

Leslie Benet, PhD Image: © majedphoto.com

During his illustrious half-century career, UCSF School of Pharmacy faculty member Leslie Benet, PhD, has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed publications, many helping to define the field of pharmacokinetics—how the body absorbs, distributes, metabolizes, and excretes medications—or as he once put it, “what the body does to the drug.”

Now a Benet paper examining how the uptake of certain types of drugs by cells in the liver is affected by toxins resulting from chronic kidney disease (CKD) has won the Ebert Prize, the oldest U.S. pharmacy award.

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