Giving

We have seen remarkable progress in treatments for individuals diagnosed with heart disease, cancer and neurological disease. The next frontier is how the immune system responds to novel types of infection. We still have much to learn about the cause, progression and treatment of infectious diseases.

The control of gene expression provides us with our total world experience: what we sense, who we are and how we respond to infections. Learning about the defense system teaches us about how we manage life. When a person’s defense system is not functioning well, the effects on patients and their families can be devastating.

What Our Scientists Do

The faculty and staff of the Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics are responsible for finding out how the human body fights infectious disease. Our department comprises a world-class team of dedicated scientists in both the basic sciences (understanding how nerve cells function) and clinical sciences (applying basic understanding to developing drugs and procedures for clinical trials).

Research projects currently underway in our department are designed to discover treatments and cures for a wide range of conditions, including epilepsy, drug addiction, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Lyme disease, Dengue Fever, malaria, spotted fever, typhus, immune disorders, viral latency and reactivation, kidney tumor syndrome, colon cancer, HIV, bacterial foodborne illnesses, Chlamydial infections causing blindness or cervical cancer, and more.

Why We Need Your Support

The cost of conducting research on these disorders is steadily increasing. Unfortunately, the financial support provided by the federal government and the California state government to individual researchers is not keeping pace. Private foundations are also trying to do more with less of their own funding.

Annual operating costs of microbiology and molecular genetics labs at UCI run several hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs for materials, overhead and people. There is also the cost of training the next generation of microbiologists to consider. The annual cost of training one student is over $40,000; students are needed for the tremendous amount of work they do in labs today… and we and our families will need their discoveries, insights and cures tomorrow.

MAKE A GIFT

For questions, please contact us at 949-824-7930.