Synapse

Scientists are making discoveries that give hope to global improvements in healthy pregnancies. The immune system is naturally primed to prevent invaders from thriving in the human body. Pregnancy presents an interesting challenge where immunity must balance defense and fetal tolerance — the fetus is foreign but must thrive. A mother reconfigures her own own defense system, constantly, as the fetus grows and changes.

​What does it take to repair a broken heart? The Biomedical Sciences (BMS) graduate program at UCSF is instilling in us profound respect for medical practitioners, and the awareness that our daily work in the lab — monotonous hours of pipetting and repeatedly failing for the slim hope of success — eventually leads to better understanding, tools, and therapies to repair damage in the human body. To repair a broken heart, it takes doctors, researchers, and those bridging the gap between a test tube and human. Doctors and researchers alike share responsibility in building, supporting, and traversing this two-way bridge, from “bench to bedside” and back again, bringing better disease understanding to researchers and advances to therapies.