News

A roundup of new research from Weill Cornell's physicians and scientists. In this installment, a study from Dr. Michel Kahaleh on the efficacy of the endoscopic radiofrequency probe for treating cancer patients with blocked bile ducts, and a study from Dr. Rainu Kaushal about how electronic health record systems help prevent prescribing errors.

Dr. Ronald Crystal wins the Sten Eriksson Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award and other awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of April 26 - May 3.

Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher speaks with Dr. Dan Fitzgerald, associate professor of medicine and co-director of the Weill Cornell Center for Global Health. Dr. Fitzgerald works primarily in Haiti, providing medical care to people in one of the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere.

A highly underutilized anesthesia technique called neuraxial anesthesia, also known as spinal or epidural anesthesia, improves outcomes in patients undergoing hip or knee replacement, according to a new study by researchers at Hospital for Special Surgery and Weill Cornell Medical College. The study, which appears in the May issue of the journal Anesthesiology, found that neuraxial anesthesia, a type of regional anesthesia, reduced morbidity, mortality, length of hospital stay and costs when compared with general anesthesia.

Woody Allen doesn't find his own movies to as funny as the rest of us do. That's what he humbly told an audience of nearly 200 Weill Cornell Medical College students, faculty and staff during the famed filmmaker, actor and writer's appearance at Weill Cornell last month.

Cancer spread or metastasis can strike unprecedented fear in the minds of cancer patients. The "seed and the soil" hypothesis proposed by Stephen Paget in 1889 is now widely accepted to explain how cancer cells (seeds) are able to generate fertile soil (the microenvironment) in distant organs that promotes cancer's spread. However, this concept does not explain why some tumors do not spread or metastasize.

Weill Cornell Medical College has reached its goal of raising $1.3 billion, completing the highly ambitious Discoveries that Make a Difference Campaign. This campaign was thought to be the largest fundraising effort ever undertaken by a medical school when it was launched in October 2006, as part of Cornell University's comprehensive capital campaign -- which recently reached the $4 billion milestone.

Slowly and deliberately, 26 groups of four descended the steps of Weill Cornell Medical College's Uris Auditorium for the Gross Anatomy program's annual memorial service.

Cancer is typically thought to develop after genes gradually mutate over time, finally overwhelming the ability of a cell to control growth. But a new closer look at genomes in prostate cancer by an international team of researchers reveals that, in fact, genetic mutations occur in abrupt, periodic bursts, causing complex, large scale reshuffling of DNA driving the development of prostate cancer.

Dr. Madhu Mazumdar elected an American Statistical Association Fellow and other awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of April 19 - 26.

A new drug is offering dramatic cure rates for hepatitis C patients with two subtypes of the infection -- genotype 2 and 3, say a team of scientists led by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers. These two subtypes account for approximately 25 percent of hepatitis C infection in the United States.

Earlier this month, more than 400 people attended an event organized by the Weill Cornell Clinical and Translational Science Center, in collaboration with Hunter College, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and discuss its legacy.

Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons have awarded The Mortimer D. Sackler, M.D. Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Developmental Psychobiology to Dr. Carla Shatz of Stanford University for her pioneering achievements in neural development, particularly as it relates to the visual system

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of April 12 - April 19.

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

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.

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.

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.