News

Nearly two dozen faculty, students and postdoctoral associates from Weill Cornell Medical College joined thousands in Washington D.C. Monday, urging Congress to restore more than $2 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health -- without which medical advances and discoveries could be negatively impacted for decades

An annual conference co-sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges on medical education will convene at Weill Cornell Medical College this Friday and Saturday.

The 31 students in Weill Cornell Medical College's Master of Science in Health Sciences for Physician Assistants Program, Class of 2015, gathered together March 18 at Weill Cornell, piling into Griffis Faculty Club with their families for their white coat ceremony -- a milestone as much a culmination of the hard work it took to get to that moment as it was the start of a 26-month journey that will lead them to their professional careers in medicine.

The Tri-Institutional M.D.- Ph.D. Program on York Avenue is a perfect 10. So says the National Institutes of Health, which, in review of the Medical Scientist Training Program grant that heavily supports the joint program between Weill Cornell Medical College, The Rockefeller University and the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, gave the application a perfect score.

Health care is undergoing a broad transformation and biomedical research -- with its emphasis on doing the basic science that makes clinical treatments possible -- has not been unaffected. The eighth annual Postdoctoral Research Day at Weill Cornell April 4 reflected these changes by exposing Weill Cornell postdoctoral associates to the pharmaceutical industry's perspective on changes taking place in the way that basic science research is funded and how that science is being translated into treatments for patients.

Weill Cornell Medical College has established the new Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, a unique, multidisciplinary translational neuroscience research hub. Named in honor of long-time benefactors Gertrude and Louis Feil, the institute was created with a generous $28 million gift from the Feil Family.

Dr. Laurie Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, speaks with Dr. Costantino Iadecola, director of the new Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, and Dr. Matthew Fink, chair of the Department of Neurology, discuss plans for the new institute and the future of neurology and neuroscience at Weill Cornell.

The inspiration for an informal alliance to better engage bioethicists at Manhattan's academic medical centers began over a casual lunch between Weill Cornell's Joseph J. Fins and NYU's Art Caplan, two leading bioethicists. Their conversation resulted in the founding of the East River Bioethics Club.

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of March 29 - April 5.

Dr. Alvin I. Mushlin, the Nanette Laitman Distinguished Professor and chairman of the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell, was selected for one of four new advisory panels of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

Weill Cornell Medical College is renovating the Samuel J. Wood Library/C.V. Starr Biomedical Information Center just as the library marks its 50th anniversary.

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.