University of California, Davis

THE UNIVERSITY OF California, Davis (UCD), is a public research university, the main campus of which is located in Davis, California, near Sacramento; the UCD Medical School is located in Sacramento. It is one of 10 universities within the University of California system and was the third branch of the University of California. It began in 1905 as an agricultural school known as the university farm. UCD became a general campus within the University of California system in 1959; this includes the UC Davis School of Medicine, which was founded in 1966. In 2006, UCD enrolled over 23,000 undergraduate and 4,000 graduate and 2,900 professional students and employed over 10,000 academic staff members including almost 2,500 faculty members and over 20,000 support staff members.

The Stem Cell Program at UCD is a multidis—ciplinary enterprise involving faculty members and researchers from the school of medicine and other parts of the university, including biological sciences, veterinary medicine, engineering, business, law, and bioethics. The program's overarching goal is to develop stem cell therapies to prevent, treat, or cure human diseases. This goal will be realized through three types of activities, as detailed on the program's Web page: performance of detailed comparisons of adult stem cells, and those from a variety of age groups, with human embryonic stem cells differentiated toward defined lineages using animal models of health and disease, including immunodeficient mice, small and large animal models, and nonhuman primate models; facilitation and enhancement of collaborations between basic, translation, and clinical faculty members in disease—specific focus groups; and the performance of high—quality, basic and translational research leading to clinical trials for stem and progenitor cell—mediated tissue repair and regeneration. Researchers in the program currently (in 2007) work with adult stem cells but may some day include embryonic stem cells as well, when questions of safety and efficacy are resolved.