UC holds fifth Global Health Day event at UCLA

T-cells clamped down onto individual breast cancer cells, invading them as a triumphant Star Wars score played over the speakers. The T-cells emerged victorious from the battle, causing audience members to chuckle.

The battle, part of a slideshow, played during UCLA engineering professor Patrick Soon-Shiong’s speech about ways emerging technology can be used to treat cancer. Soon-Shiong, the executive director of the UCLA Wireless Health Institute, spoke Saturday morning during the University of California Global Health Day in Covel Commons.

This year marked the first time the event took place at UCLA. A few hundred faculty and students from across the UC system attended.

In its fifth year, the health day is an event that aims to bring together UC faculty, students and researchers to showcase their research and network, said Rahwa Neguse, a program analyst at the UC Global Health Institute and event organizer. The institute looks to combine the resources of all 10 campuses to improve health worldwide for the next generation.

At the event, Soon-Shiong said he thinks researchers should focus on drugs that directly attack cancer stem cells.

“You’re winning the battle and losing the war,” he said, referring to drugs that lengthen the survival of patients by a couple of months instead of targeting the cancer itself. Those life-extending treatments have recently been the focus of much research, he said.

Steven Wallace, the event’s second speaker and chairperson of the UCLA Department of Community Health Sciences, presented his study on the legislative treatment of undocumented individuals in the U.S. The health sciences department targets improving health in diverse communities.

The involvement of policy in the event was the first time a presentation has been focused on a political topic, Neguse said.

Wallace’s study examined economic issues such as health insurance for children and pregnant women, food stamps, tuition costs and financial aid. The study ranked each state based on the openness of its laws.

The event highlighted more than just health policies, said Thomas Coates, the chair of the event and director of the UCLA Center for World Health. Other subjects, he said, are also intimately related to health.

“Economics and health go hand in glove,” he said.

Organizers deliberately included an immigration policy outlook in the event because they think it is an important and related issue, Coates said.

“When these (immigrants) come here, what do you do with them?” he asked. “Do you treat them with hostility, or do you take care of them in such a way that you need to because it benefits everybody?”

As well as hosting speakers, the program included a presentation of the winners of this year’s Global Heath Video Challenge and poster presentations by UC students and organizations highlighting their work and projects.

Rachel Mernoff, a first-year undeclared student, won the event’s Student Plenary Contest, a competition that sought out essays from students on emerging challenges in global health, for her entry on body image in Venezuela. She read aloud her essay on Saturday, which emphasizes the high rate of cosmetic surgery among Venezuelan women.

Quingshan Wei, a postdoctoral scholar in electrical engineering and biomedical sciences at UCLA, presented his project on a portable attachment to mobile phones that could identify protein biomarkers and parasites.

His hope is that its easy interface – which includes an app in addition to the hardware of the attachment – can make diagnoses simpler.

“It’s not just to replace the physician,” he said. “It’s to increase the frequency of these diagnostics. It’s the best cellphone microscope so far.”

UC Berkeley students Aarti Kumar and Marilyn Stephen said they attended the event because of their work with India Smiles, an organization that aims to treat oral health problems related to junk food and educate communities about them.

“It’s really empowering that global health can affect so many communities in different ways,” Stephen said.

The annual event is hosted at a different UC campus each year and will likely be at UC San Francisco next spring, Neguse said.