UCSF Department of Neurological Surgery

07/28/2026

Join us this fall for a free eight-week online program designed for the care partners of people with brain tumors! Palliative care chaplain and educator Judy Long will teach participants evidence-based skills to help make their caregiving sustainable.

Each class has its own theme and provides the opportunity to practice new skills in a safe place. Themes include:

1. Attentional balance and grounding
2. Stress responses and meeting difficult emotions
3. Positive intention setting
4. Self-compassion
5. Challenging relationships and patients’ concerns around “being a burden”
6. Reframing chronic sorrow and ambiguous loss
7. Finding balance and growth in adversity
8. "What works for me?" Wellness practice journals to cultivate a positive mindset

Learn more and register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sustainable-caregiving-for-care-partners-of-people-w-primary-brain-tumors-tickets-1990828356205?aff=oddtdtcreator

07/28/2026

Caregivers must often juggle a new set of responsibilities to support their loved one’s physical and emotional well-being while still dealing with their own emotional struggles.

Michelle Mathai’s experience caring for her older brother for nearly 20 years after his brain tumor diagnosis was a master class in developing resilience and adapting to change. Among the biggest things that helped her was building a community that she could rely on.

Watch to learn more strategies to put in your caregiver toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBh-ktGQokw

07/22/2026

Out today in Nature: Neurosurgeon-scientist Daniel Lim, MD, PhD, and colleagues UCSF have discovered that genes are controlled not only by DNA sequence and chemical epigenetic marks, but also by where they are located inside the nucleus.

During human brain development, hundreds of genes physically move from the quiet outer edge of the nucleus (the lamina) to active interior hubs (the speckles), where their activity can increase by as much as eightfold. Remarkably, genes forced to remain at the nuclear edge stayed silent even after a major repressive epigenetic mark was removed.

These findings establish a new paradigm: a gene's spatial location is fundamental to understanding its regulation and function. Because this principle likely applies across many cell types, it has broad implications for human biology and for diseases linked to altered gene regulation—including brain tumors, neurodegeneration, and age-related decline.

Citation: Sajad Hamid Ahanger, Evan R. Semenza, Chujing Zhang, Eugene Gil, Mitchel A. Cole, Serena Huei-An Lu, Li Wang, Arnold R. Kriegstein, Daniel A. Lim. Subnuclear genome compartmentalization controls bivalent chromatin activity. Nature. 2026 July 22. doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-10832-w

This publication is Open Access! Read it here:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10832-w.pdf

Learn more about the Lim lab's research at: https://danlimlab.ucsf.edu/
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Images:

Slide 1: Text laid over micrograph reads: “A New Dimension of Gene Expression. Just published in Nature, UCSF scientists show that where a gene sits inside the nucleus is fundamental to how it is regulated.”

Slide 2: Drawing of switch from lamina-associated domains (LAD) to speckles-associated domains (SPAD) during differentiation from radial glia (RG) to excitatory neurons (EN). Created by the Lim lab with BioRender.

Slide 3: Representative DNA-FISH micrographs of the STY1 gene loci (red) relocating LAD to SPAD, with lamin B1 and SON immunostaining (green) in cells of the germinal zone (left) and cortical plate (right).

Slide 4: The fold change in expression of bivalent genes that resolve to the H3K4me3-monovalent state during RG-to-EN differentiation stratified by LAD to SPAD dynamics. (WG = whole genome).

Slide 5: Text reads “These findings have major implications for our understanding of brain development, neurodegenerative disease, cancer and aging” with icons representing each of these words.

07/21/2026

We're looking forward to participating in the American Brain Tumor Association 2026 National Conference! Join us as we come together to share ideas and learn from brain tumor experts, including UCSF Health's Shawn Hervey-Jumper, MD, Pavithra Viswanath,PhD, David Raleigh, MD, PhD!

Learn more and register: bit.ly/ABTA2026NC

07/20/2026

Congratulations, Zachary!

Learn more about his care at UCSF: https://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/news/multidisciplinary-expert-team-makes-the-difference-for-rare-cervical-chordoma

07/17/2026

Great to see UCSF Health spine neurosurgeon Praveen Mummaneni, MD, featured in Becker's Spine Review! As a leader of the Spine Clinical Outcomes Registry (CORe) study team, he and his colleagues have tracked the quality of life outcomes of thousands of spine surgery patients across 14 institutions. This long-term data has changed the way he talks to patients about the lasting benefits of surgery.

"The expectation should be that you’re going to have surgery, that you’re going to resume an active and healthy lifestyle, and that you’re going to go back to work, and you’re going to get off the opiates,” he said.

Read more about this research from the Quality Outcomes Database: https://www.beckersspine.com/spine/the-report-card-spine-surgery-has-been-waiting-for/

07/17/2026

Join us at Lakeside Park in Oakland on Saturday, August 29, for this year's American Brain Tumor Association Northern California Run & Walk! Come help our team of physicians, staff, researchers, patients and their loved ones as we gather in support of those living with a brain tumor and raise funding for research to advance their care.

Register to join our team: https://give.abta.org/team/836433

07/16/2026

Today is , and we’re highlighting one of our new clinical trials for glioblastoma. This phase 2 trial for adult patients who are experiencing their first tumor recurrence aims to identify which tumors are most likely to respond to treatment with the immune checkpoint inhibitor atezoliumab.

Through our expanding clinical trials portfolio, our team continues working hard to advance care for this condition.

For more information on this and other brain tumor trials, visit btc.ucsf.edu.

🎨: Terry Nguyen

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Video description:
A series of animations illustrating how a new phase 2 trial for recurrent glioblastoma works. The first shows how a T cell (green) interacts with a tumor cell (pink), highlighting how immune checkpoint inhibitors block the interaction between immune checkpoint proteins, enabling the T cell to recognize and destroy the tumor cell. The next animations show a tumor cell (pink) surrounded by a T cell (green) and other immune cells (blue and purple), followed by the study timeline, which indicates that, as part of the trial, participants will receive the immune checkpoint inhibitor before and after surgery, and finally how different biomarkers from each person (DNA, immune cells, white blood cells, and antigens) will help researchers identify factors that make a tumor more susceptible to treatment. The text on the final slide with the full name of the trial reads, A Multicenter Trial to Identify Optimal Atezolizumab Biomarkers in the Setting of Recurrent Glioblastoma: The MOAB Trial, NCT06069726.

07/14/2026

What is missing from the debates surrounding e-bike freedoms and regulation is the focus on the injuries that happen when kids crash their bikes.

07/13/2026

UCSF Health neurosurgeon Dr. Blake Taylor shares his experience caring for an increasing number of young patients who have been severely injured after falling off an e-bike.

“These e-bike injuries are not like those associated with traditional bikes,” he writes in USA TODAY. "They are more like motorcycle injuries, and the risk of dying is greater. Those who survive may deal with concussions, comas, skull fractures, tearing of brain tissue, brain swelling and bleeding.”

Read more about how you can prevent e-bike injuries:

What is missing from the debates surrounding e-bike freedoms and regulation is the focus on the injuries that happen when kids crash their bikes.