News

Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College and provost for medical affairs of Cornell University, is the winner of a prestigious award from a group of female scientists from The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research dedicated to celebrating outstanding women in science and medicine.

In less than a week, Jonathan Bourne will achieve a milestone he's dedicated the last eight years to achieving: graduating Weill Cornell Medical College with a doctorate in physiology, biophysics and systems biology from the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. For his accomplishments, the graduate school will recognize Bourne as the 2013 Distinguished Graduate Student Commencement Speaker. We caught up with Bourne to get his thoughts on his upcoming speech May 30 at Carnegie Hall, his time pursuing a doctorate at Weill Cornell and what's next in his career.

Dr. John Leonard, an internationally-recognized hematology and oncology expert specializing in the treatment of lymphomas at Weill Cornell Medical College, has been named chair of the Lymphoma Committee for the prestigious National Cancer Institute-sponsored group, the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology. Dr. Leonard is the associate dean for clinical research at Weill Cornell and director of the Joint Clinical Trials Office at Weill Cornell and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Kidney transplant patients whose bodies are rejecting their new organs currently have to undergo needle biopsies to monitor their progress, but Weill Cornell Medical College researchers say they've developed a new method that's non-invasive and just as effective: A urine test.

Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar's 35 new graduates received their M.D. degrees in a ceremony hosted May 8 at Qatar National Convention Centre.

The goal of becoming a qualified physician moved a little closer for 16 students at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar Monday as they celebrated completing the university's Foundation Program.

A soon-to-be-tested class of drug inhibitors were predicted to help a limited number of patients with B-cell lymphomas with mutations affecting the EZH2 protein. However, a research team, led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College, now report that these agents may, in fact, help a much broader cross section of lymphoma patients.

Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College have successfully tested their novel anti-cocaine vaccine in primates, bringing them closer to launching human clinical trials.

Awards, honors, prizes and achievements for the week of May 3 - 10.

Dr. Augustine M. K. Choi has been appointed chairman of the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and physician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, effective Aug. 1, 2013. Dr. Choi currently is the Parker B. Francis Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital celebrated the dedication of the W. P. Carey Emergency Unit at a ceremony held on Thursday, May 2, 2013. Made possible by a $5 million gift from the W. P. Carey Foundation, the facility is a critical component of the hospital's emergency services.

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.