ScienceMag reported on a new five-year, $3.9 million National Cancer Institute grant awarded to UCLA’s Cristina Puig-Saus and her research team to develop new strategies to improve cancer immunotherapy. The researchers, based at the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, have created a fast, large-scale drug-screening platform to identify compounds that help T cells better recognize and destroy cancer cells. The work initially focuses on melanoma, but the approach could be expanded to other cancers. Read more about UCLA in today’s Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and others.

More highlights from UCLA in the News: August 6, 2026

Feds say public transit is unsafe, but their data says otherwise | The Washington Post

Looking at data from public buses, Minneapolis; Fresno, California; and suburban Philadelphia had the worst passenger safety rates. New York had among the best. “The data doesn’t support the narratives about these systems that are being singled out for being particularly dangerous,” said Jacob Wasserman, research program manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.

83 lawsuits that are keeping Californians safe | Los Angeles Times

I’m going to sound like a bus bench ad for the legal profession, but, at this point, “the courts are standing as the only barrier to the president doing anything that the president wants to do,” Hiroshi Motomura, a professor of law at UCLA, told me.  

The race for LA mayor | Spectrum News 1

“I think it certainly suggests that Karen Bass is not going easily. She is a significant candidate. She’s an incumbent. And by the way, she’s not, historically, a particularly good fundraiser. So, the fact that she’s raising money in big chunks suggests that there are people out there who believe that she can and will win, and are prepared to support her,” said UCLA’s Jim Newton (approx. 25:25 mark).

Why insurance matters to renters, landlords and California | CalMatters

In Altadena, the area north of Pasadena that bore the brunt of the deadly Eaton Fire, 22% of households were tenants and more than one-third of the rental market was rent-controlled, according to research by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute. The researchers also noted that prior to the fire, Altadena tenant households had much lower incomes than homeowner households, and were more likely to have their short-term displacement turn into long-term housing instability.