A gift to the UCSF Department of Surgery can help physicians and scientist find treatments and cures for serious liver diseases such as hepatitis B & C, and liver cancer.
Dr. Doug Miniati is an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the UCSF Division of Pediatric Surgery and Fetal Treatment Center. Dr. Miniati completed his undergraduate education in 1992, at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he received a BA in Biochemistry. He went on to obtain a medical degree from New York University School of Medicine in 1996, and then completed the first two years of general surgery residency at the University of Maryland. Initially interested in pursuing a career in cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. Miniati extended his clinical training to accept a two-year appointment as a postdoctoral research fellow in the cardiac transplantation biology laboratory of Robert Robbins at Stanford University. Following his research fellowship, Dr. Miniati decided to stay at Stanford for the remainder of general surgery residency. It was during this time that Dr. Miniati rotated through the pediatric surgery service, and realized where his clinical interests and enthusiasm lay.
With the support and encouragement of his Stanford mentors, Dr. Miniati embarked on pediatric surgery fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine/Texas Children's Hospital in 2004. There, he developed a clinical interest in congenital diaphragmatic hernia, particularly with respect to the development of treatment strategies to improve outcomes. Other areas of clinical interest for him are cystic lung masses and pediatric renal, non-Wilms', tumors-topics on which he has published in peer-reviewed journals. Now at UCSF, Dr. Miniati continues his clinical and basic science research pursuits, focused on the underlying biology and pathophysiology of pulmonary development, growth, and function.
For years, surgeons have been seeking ways of operating on babies in the womb, reasoning that medical abnormalities are easier to address while the fetus is still developing. Now, for the first time, a large clinical trial has shown that fetal surgery can also benefit infants with non life-threatening conditions. The eight-year study, led by Dr. Diana Farmer, Chief of the Division of Pediatric Surgery at UCSF, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that babies born with myelomeningocele, the most common form of spina bifida, a debilitating spinal abnormality, were twice as likely to walk and experienced fewer neurological problems with in utero repair versus standard post-natal repair. Dr. Farmer characterized it as a " huge game-changer for fetal surgery". Dr. Michael Harrison, who pioneered fetal surgery at UCSF, was a principal investigator on the trial before retiring.