A history of accomplishments.

Just a few of UCLA's Medical Breakthroughs
1956 - First open-heart surgery in Western United States performed.

1962 - Nerve transplantation techniques developed.

1964 - Test developed which has become the international standard for tissue typing: no patient can receive an organ transplant without the test.

1974 - Imaging technology known as positron emission tomography (PET), which visualizes metabolic changes in the brain and body, was developed. In February 1999, Michael Phelps, inventor of PET scanning and chair of UCLA's Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award, the government's oldest science and technology prize.

1976 - First total shoulder replacement performed.

1981 - Research resulted in a new technique known as retro-perfusion, which uses a pump to oxygenate blood and restore damaged heart muscle immediately after a heart attack.

1985 - Removal of kidney stones is accomplished non-surgically with a lithotripter for the first time on the West Coast.

1987 - All five transplant programs: bone marrow, kidney, heart, liver and pancreas offered at one hospital for the first time in the Western United States.

1993 - First live donor liver transplantation successfully completed in Southern California.

1998 - UCLA's Herceptin (a new drug that can be effective for breast cancer patients who have an over-abundance in their tumor cells of a gene called HER-2/neu) is approved by the FDA.

1999 - Jonsson Cancer Center researchers were the first to demonstrate that smoking marijuana may increase the risk of head and neck cancers.

2000 - Dr. Larry Zipursky discovered that a single gene known to control the sequence of a neuron guidance receptor in the fruit fly can generate 38,000 different but related proteins. This extraordinary diversity, proven through alternative splicing, has no precedent in the nervous system.

2001 - UCLA plastic surgeon Dr. Marc Hedrick announced that his research team had successfully harvested stem cells from human fat removed via liposuction and grown bone, muscle, cartilage and fat tissue. The findings hold promise as the first plentiful and easily obtained source of stem cells.

2002 - Dr. Andrew Leuchter, professor of psychiatry and director of adult psychiatry at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, used quantitative EEG images to show for the first time changes in brain function among depression patients who responded to placebo, or sugar pill.

2003 - A new vaccine based on UCLA research was shown to stop the progression of type 1 diabetes. The vaccine, which is the culmination of more than 20 years of work by UCLA researchers, may lead to a cure for this condition, which affects one in 300 people.

2004 - UCLA researchers showed for the first time that air pollutants alone may cause acute asthma attacks.