Collaborations

UCLA Collaborative Center for Integrative Medicine:

A comprehensive, interdepartmental program dedicated to the practice, teaching, and research on complementary and alternative medicine. This UCLA Collaborative Centers for Integrative Medicine seeks to promote activities that are aimed at integrating the best that Mind Body, Complementary, Alternative, and Western Biomedicine has to offer, e.g. integrative approaches. It also aims to foster research evaluating the effectiveness of a broad range of Mind Body, Complementary, and Alternative Medicine approaches, and/or mechanisms underlying their effectiveness. Our center for excellence is a member of this collaborative center.

Southern California Research Center for Alcoholic Liver and Pancreatic Diseases and Cirrhosis:

This NIAAA funded Alcohol Research Center, under the leadership of Drs. Hidekazu Tsukamoto and Stephen J. Pandol, constitutes the first Los Angeles city-wide Center for Excellence devoted to Studies on Alcoholic Liver and Pancreatic Injury. The Center is created through the consolidation of existing collaborative and interactive programs among the established investigators at Southern California. These investigators are unified by the Center’s theme, “Elucidation of the mechanisms by which ethanol primes and sensitizes the liver and pancreas for injury,” which illustrates their shared research philosophy and goal. The pancreatic disease research work is close collaboration and interaction with our center.

Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research: 

The Foundation established the Ronald S. Hirshberg Translational Pancreatic Cancer Research Laboratory at UCLA, which consists of approximately 1800 square feet of space on the second floor of the MacDonald Medical Research Laboratories (MRL) Building (rooms 2532 and 2535) adjacent to the Medical Center on the UCLA campus. The laboratory is well equipped as a modern state-of-the-art molecular laboratory, fully set up for tissue culture, protein and nucleic acid isolation and detection, radiation work, and immunohistochemistry. This laboratory houses our animal core facilities. In addition, the Hirshberg Foundation funded our center pancreatic cancer tissue bank and pilot/feasibility seed grant.

NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) Centers of Excellence in CAM Research Program:

The Centers of Excellence apply cutting-edge technology to basic and clinical research on a wide range of CAM practices and products, and are one part of NCCAM’s larger research centers program. The program also includes Developmental Centers for Research on CAM, which are partnerships between CAM institutions and established research institutions to conduct exploratory research, and International Centers for Research on CAM, which are collaborations of U.S. and foreign teams studying traditional medical systems.

Our UCLA Center of Excellence in Pancreatic Diseases has been funded by NCCAM in 2007. It will study the mechanisms and effects of phytonutrients on the prevention and/or treatment of pancreatic cancer and Pancreatitis (inflammation of the pancreas).