News

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of March 22 - March 29.

Attention men! Now it's your turn to have a center specially designed to meet your health care needs. The first of its kind in the region, the Iris Cantor Men's Health Center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center is a bright, open and high-tech environment where internists and urologists provide men with full-service health care, from heart rate to the prostate. The center offers men the same kind of comprehensive care the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center has provided to women since it opened a decade ago.

Dr. Hugh C. Hemmings Jr. has been appointed chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College and anesthesiologist-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Dr. Hemmings currently serves as vice chair for research in the Department of Anesthesiology, the Distinguished Research Professor in Anesthetic Mechanisms, professor of anesthesiology and of pharmacology and attending anesthesiologist.

Humans don't "own" their own genes, the cellular chemicals that define who they are and what diseases they might be at risk for. Through more than 40,000 patents on DNA molecules, companies have essentially claimed the entire human genome for profit, report two researchers who analyzed the patents on human DNA. Their study, published March 25 in the journal Genome Medicine, raises an alarm about the loss of individual "genomic liberty."

Two studies led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College shed light on the molecular biology of three blood disorders, leading to novel strategies to treat these diseases.

In its 2001 report Crossing the Quality Chasm, the Institute of Medicine outlined six domains of quality in medical care: safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timeliness, efficiency and equity. But, Dr. Tara Bishop writes in a new viewpoint article published online March 21, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), current quality measures for the outpatient setting do not include all of these domains. As a result, quality measurement and quality improvement efforts in the outpatient setting have neglected critical areas of high quality care.

More than 50,000 stem cell transplants are performed each year worldwide. A research team led by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators may have solved a major issue of expanding adult hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) outside the human body for clinical use in bone marrow transplantation -- a critical step towards producing a large supply of blood stem cells needed to restore a healthy blood system.

A multi-center analysis, led by Weill Cornell Medical College and published in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, shows the use of temporary "fully covered self-expanding metal stents" (FCSEMS) can effectively fix a painful and potentially life-threatening benign biliary stricture — a severely blocked or narrowed bile duct.

The student-run Medical Student Research Day event featured oral and poster presentations across the medical disciplines from 25 student researchers, who dedicated summers and evenings -- some even took a year off from school -- to conduct their studies.

The 94 graduating Weill Cornell M.D. and M.D.-Ph.D. students learned where they will be doing their residency training -- the next three to seven years of their medical careers -- during national Match Day Friday.

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), a key feature of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aim to control health care costs, enhance quality in health care and improve population health. But what does "improving population health" really mean? This is the question asked in a new viewpoint article by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers published in the March 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The authors argue a clear definition is crucial in order to formulate effective health care and social service policy.

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of March 15 - March 22.

Diabetes tops the list of preventable conditions and risk factors associated with heart attack and stroke in Qatar, according to a study appearing in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Local and Global Health Perspectives.

Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar's (WCMC-Q) health campaign Sahtak Awalan: Your Health First has launched a new mobile phone app that helps users maintain a healthy diet and encourages them to exercise as well. The app is called Your Health First: Calorie Counter.

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of March 8 - March 15.

Weill Cornell Medical College and its faculty practice, the Weill Cornell Physician Organization, today celebrated the opening of a new medical practice at 2315 Broadway at West 84th Street. The comprehensive practice expands access to Weill Cornell's world-class physicians on Manhattan's West Side and offers imaging, primary care and the most in-demand specialty services to children and adults — all under one roof.

Today, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and U.S. Rep. Chris Gibson (R-N.Y.), in partnership with the Tick-Borne Disease Alliance (TBDA), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness and promoting advocacy to find a cure for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, hosted a forum at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City to discuss the fight against the silent epidemic of tick-borne diseases, including Lyme disease. A satellite forum was held at SUNY Ulster, and the event was streamed live at tbdalliance.org and weill.cornell.edu/tickborne/.

Weill Cornell Medical College has been awarded more than $1.9 million by the National Institute of Mental Health of the National Institutes of Health to lead an innovative research study using advanced neuroimaging and clinical evaluations of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). The new four-year clinical study, to be conducted in collaboration with Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Beth Israel Medical Center, will aim to expand the scientific understanding of CFS, improve diagnostics for the condition and discover novel biomarkers, all of which may lead to the identification of new and more effective treatment targets.

Approximately 400,000 foreign-born survivors of persecution and torture live in the United States, struggling to receive asylum. Addressing the complex challenges faced by these asylum seekers requires collaboration and resource-sharing across the human rights community. With that goal in mind, the Weill Cornell Center for Human Rights (WCCHR) will host the first annual New York Asylum Network Luncheon from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. Saturday, March 9 at Weill Cornell Medical College's Weill Greenberg Center, 1305 York Ave. This innovative forum will bring together activists, professionals and students to develop vital solutions to the common challenges faced by persons seeking asylum in the U.S.

The powerful master regulatory transcription factor called Bcl6 is key to the survival of a majority of aggressive lymphomas, which arise from the B-cells of the immune system. The protein has long been considered too complex to target with a drug since it is also crucial to the healthy functioning of many immune cells in the body, not just B cells gone bad.