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Young Asian woman nurse, caregiver assist a senior Asian woman to do physical therapy and exercise arms

REACH Center Launches to Advance Whole Person Health Through Translational Science

Oct 23,2025

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The University of California San Diego School of Medicine’s Centers for Integrative Health has received a five-year, $6.2 million grant from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish the REACH Center for Translational Science on Whole Person Health. 

The three principal investigators are Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D.,  clinical professor in the Department of Family Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, Gene “Rusty” Kallenberg, M.D., professor emeritus in the Department of Family Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine and founding director of the Centers for Integrative Health, and Ryan Bradley, N.D., M.P.H., associate professor at UC San Diego Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science.

The goal of whole person health is to promote health and prevent disease by addressing the interconnected physical, social and emotional factors that contribute to overall well-being, as well as a patient’s values and beliefs. It emphasizes personalized, coordinated care across different health care providers and disciplines.

“ Conventional medicine is hyper-specialized,  and that's been extremely powerful for helping us cure disease and make advancements in health, but we aren't just separate organs or body systems,” said Vieten, who is also director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness.

The initiative is designed to advance research in whole person health through strategic partnerships between UC San Diego and accredited institutions specializing in complementary and integrative health (CIH) modalities such as acupuncture, physical therapy, naturopathic medicine and East Asian medicine. 

While these institutions offer training in whole person health, many lack access to research and funding opportunities — as well as cutting-edge technology — to conduct translational studies that can turn scientific discoveries into real-world health solutions for patients.

“The REACH Center will create a virtual resource hub for these schools so that they can have access to the world-class biomedical research infrastructure that we have here at UC San Diego,” said Vieten. 

The collaboration will initially support at least 26 new research scholars from six CIH institutions through a two-year career advancement program, pairing them with integrative medicine and translational research faculty mentors from UC San Diego and other University of California health campuses, including the Samueli Institute for Integrative Medicine at UC Irvine, the Center for Integrative Medicine at UC Davis, the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health, and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Participants will receive micro-credential training in research methodologies, guidance on developing pilot projects, and access to UC San Diego’s state-of-the-art facilities, including the  CIT Biomarker Lab, the Center for Microbiome Innovation at Jacobs School of Engineering and the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute (ACTRI).

In addition, the initiative will fund between 15 and 30 pilot grants to assist research scholars and other faculty from CIH institutions in launching their own research careers in order to drive innovation in translational science. These projects will leverage the University of California’s advanced technologies and large patient populations, addressing longstanding challenges such as study size, statistical rigor, and access to clinical data.

“ This funding opportunity was specifically designed to build capacity at complementary and integrative health universities,” said Bradley.

UC San Diego can also benefit from collaborative research with these institutions to investigate possible mechanisms of action for various modalities, which modalities work, and what works for each individual patient, according to Vieten. 

Within five years, the REACH Center aims to significantly increase the number and quality of research grants submitted by complementary and integrative health institutions, foster long-term collaborations, and retain talented researchers within the field. The objective is to generate innovative, evidence-based approaches that improve health outcomes and inform national health care policy. 

“The ultimate goal is to have these universities submitting higher quality research grants that are fundable, and that process will likely start with collaborative grant opportunities with us here at UC San Diego,” said Bradley. The first cohort of UC San Diego REACH trainees will begin in January 2026, and opportunities to apply for pilot grants are already open.

“This effort to help other CIH institutions develop their research programs and research-capable faculty will also help our own CIH faculty, who can collaborate with them along the way and also participate in the group educational activities our REACH Center develops,” said Kallenberg.

Mushroom formulation or QFPDT as Anti-COVID Agents

JAMA: Trials Test Mushrooms and Herbs as Anti-COVID Agents

Nov 03,2021

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In the COVID-19 pandemic’s early days, integrative medicine specialists Gordon Saxe, MD, PhD, MPH, and Andrew Shubov, MD, watched in frustration as desperate patients infected with the novel coronavirus tried one ineffective remedy after another. “People were taking increasingly toxic drugs, and nothing was working,” Shubov said in an interview.

Missing from those early hit-or-miss therapeutics, however, were traditional medicines such as Chinese herbs and medicinal mushrooms. The omission was glaring to Saxe, an epidemiologist and executive director of the Krupp Center for Integrative Research at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), whose research focuses on using food as medicine. Shubov, director of Inpatient Integrative Medicine, Center for East-West Medicine, at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), also found it a stark oversight.

So in April 2020, they applied to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval to conduct 2 randomized phase 1 trials. The double-blind, placebo-controlled studies would evaluate the safety and feasibility of treating mild to moderate COVID-19 with either medicinal mushrooms, which have a long history as natural therapeutics for pulmonary disease, or a Chinese herb formulation that’s widely used there as a COVID-19 remedy.

The FDA ultimately sanctioned the MACH-19 (Mushrooms and Chinese Herbs for COVID-19) trials, which are now underway at UCLA and UCSD and are supported by the Krupp Endowed Fund. Meanwhile, a third MACH-19 trial is investigating the use of medicinal mushrooms as an adjuvant to COVID-1vaccines.....click https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2786023  to continue

 

ITIS: Dr. Guma crEATES A BETTER DIET

ITIS: A Super-Charged Mediterranean Diet for RA-Arthritus Foundation

Oct 20,2021

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Diets fall in and out of favor, but the Mediterranean diet has stood the test of time. Decades of research have shown that a plant-based mix, including vegetables, fruit, legumes, olive oil, fish and whole grains, can improve or prevent many chronic diseases, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and arthritis.

Scientists trace the diet’s benefits in part to its positive effect on the microbiome — the rich ecosystem of microbes, or microorganisms, that inhabit our bodies, especially the gut.

What you eat can encourage or inhibit the growth of certain types of gut bacteria, increase or decrease overall diversity and influence metabolites the microbes produce, which are key players in activating inflammation. An unhealthy microbiome — one that’s less diverse and unbalanced — is associated with autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in susceptible people.  

Mediterranean Diet 2.0

“We know the Mediterranean diet is good for patients with rheumatoid arthritis,” says Monica Guma, MD, a rheumatologist and researcher at the University of California, San Diego. “But there also might be something better.” That something is what she calls the ITIS diet. It’s the Mediterranean diet supercharged with anti-inflammatory foods and herbs that may improve gut health and arthritis symptoms.

She and her colleagues spent a year designing the diet. At four different stages, they consulted patients to make sure the diet was affordable and was one they could stick with for the two-week study period. They made a few changes as needed.

The diet includes a lot of things the standard Mediterranean doesn’t, including:

  • A home-made green drink (green vegetables and fruit) every morning
  • Oily fish such as sardines, salmon or tuna at least twice a week
  • A high daily intake of monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFA) from avocado, nuts, sesame seeds or sesame butter (tahini)
  • Daily chia seeds and flaxseed oil
  • Unsweetened yogurt and miso, a fermented soybean paste
  • Fruits high in enzymes, such as pineapple and papaya
  • Daily green tea
  • Turmeric (used with black pepper for better absorption) and ginger

It also excludes some things the Mediterranean diet allows:

  • Wheat flour and gluten
  • Tomatoes, potatoes and eggplant, which may worsen arthritis symptoms in some people
  • Salt
  • Combining protein with grains (spaghetti and meatballs, for example)

Red meat, sugar, soda and processed or fast foods are out of bounds in both the Mediterranean and ITIS diets.

ITIS Diet Study Results

Twenty-two highly motivated patients with doctor-diagnosed RA followed the ITIS diet for two weeks. They continued taking prescribed medications during the study. Half experienced a 50% improvement in pain and swelling as well as in subjective measures such as fatigue, often in three or four days. A few patients went into complete remission.

“They got better really quickly,” Dr. Guma says........read the entire article at The Arthritis Foundation by clicking the link above.