Research that Impacts Lives

Home to over 20 departments, centers and institutes, the UCLA Division of Life Sciences is at the forefront of innovative research and teaching, driving discoveries that impact lives. From better treatments to infertility, to experimental drugs that prevent heart failure, to finding cures for autoimmune disorders, UCLA Life Sciences advances research that leads to real-world breakthroughs. Your gift to the Life Sciences Greatest Needs Fund ensures that our faculty and scholars can continue researching our most pressing health challenges.

Gifts to the Life Sciences Greatest Needs Fund will help us sustain student and trainee support, preserve faculty research momentum and equip the next generation of scientists with the resources they need to pursue scientific breakthroughs and advancements. With your gift, we can continue to support the brilliant minds in our Division. Thank you for joining us during this year’s Blue & Gold Challenge. Below, you can learn more about the breadth of research conducted by UCLA Life Sciences faculty and alumni.

Faculty Research

UCLA scientists advance gene therapy for deadly blood disorder
Linda Wang, UCLA Newsroom

Dr. Donald Kohn and postdoctoral scholar Eva Segura.

Thanks to groundbreaking in-utero blood transfusion technology, what was once a fatal diagnosis in the womb can now result in live births. However, this medical advancement created a new challenge: a growing population of children born with that diagnosis — the severe, inherited blood disorder alpha thalassemia — which requires lifelong specialized care.

But a UCLA research team led by gene therapy pioneer Dr. Donald Kohn is developing a one-time stem cell gene therapy treatment for this condition that’s potentially curative. The study findings are detailed in Cell Reports Medicine.

“This work really began when Dr. Tippi MacKenzie, a pediatric surgeon at UC San Francisco who was treating these cases, reached out to us,” said senior author Kohn, a distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics and a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA. “She recognized that our gene therapy approach could be exactly what these children needed.”

The team has been awarded a grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to complete preclinical studies and prepare a pre-investigational new drug package submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the first step toward launching a clinical trial to evaluate the therapy in humans. 

“More babies with alpha thalassemia major are surviving birth than ever before, thanks to in-utero blood transfusions,” Kohn said. “Now we’re working to give them the chance at a completely normal life, free from a lifetime of medical dependence.”

Better treatments for infertility

Dr. Amander Clark

For people trying to start or build a family, infertility is a devastating diagnosis. UCLA’s Amander Clark, a reproductive scientist and internationally recognized stem cell biologist, is working to change that.

Clark has spent her career studying the reproductive organs and the process by which stem cells in the body transform into germ cells, the precursors of egg and sperm cells. The goal, she says, is to better understand the biological basis of people’s reproductive health and fertility and, ultimately, to create functioning egg and sperm cells in the lab by reprogramming a person’s own stem cells — offering hope to the 1 in 6 people worldwide who struggle with infertility.

Her ongoing research to improve treatments for infertility have already led to breakthroughs that could make the process of in vitro fertilization more efficient and less painful and improve the viability of implanted embryos.

Most recently, Clark and her team developed the first comprehensive “road map” showing how the ovarian reserve forms in primates, providing crucial insights into women’s health that could revolutionize treatments for infertility and hormonal disorders such as polycystic ovary syndrome. That reserve — the lifetime supply of eggs that a woman is born with — serves not only as the foundation for reproduction but also as the driver of hormone production in the ovaries. Despite governing so many crucial aspects of women’s health, how this finite supply of eggs actually develops has remained largely a mystery until now.

“It’s what enables women to become mothers, girls to progress through puberty, and it acts like a biological clock counting down to menopause,” said Clark, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology and director of the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education. “We now have a complete manual that could help scientists create more accurate human ovarian models to better study ovarian disease and dysfunction and develop better treatment options for those who suffer from infertility.”

Alumni Research

UCLA alumnus Fred Ramsdell wins 2025 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine
Todd Schindler and Nancy Gondo, UCLA Newsroom

Fred Ramsdell / Creative Commons

Immunologist Frederick J. “Fred” Ramsdell, who earned his doctorate in microbiology and immunology from UCLA in 1987, has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his groundbreaking work on the human immune system.

Ramsdell, a scientific advisor with Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, shares the prize with Mary Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their collective research on how immune cells known as regulatory T cells prevent the immune system from harming the body’s own tissues.

Their discoveries, the Nobel committee noted, have laid the foundation for a new field of research known as peripheral immune tolerance and have spurred the pursuit of regulatory T cell–centered therapeutics in areas like cancer, autoimmune disease and stem cell transplantation. There are currently more than 200 ongoing clinical trials based on their research.

“Fred Ramsdell’s research on the immune system has transformed our understanding of autoimmune diseases and led to treatments that are saving lives around the world,” said UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk. “From improving care for conditions like multiple sclerosis to advancing cancer therapies, his work is driving medical breakthroughs that will shape the future of human health. I hope Bruins everywhere take pride in this well-deserved global recognition."

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