Cornell's Translational Research Institute for Pain in Later Life (TRIPLL), a New York City-based center to help older adults prevent and manage pain, has received a five-year, $1.95 million renewal grant from the National Institute on Aging.

The institute, formed in 2009 as one of 12 national Edward R. Roybal Centers for Translational Research on Aging, studies innovative, nonpharmacological methods to ease persistent pain, which is estimated to afflict nearly half of older Americans. TRIPLL unites social and psychological scientists at Cornell's Ithaca campus, Weill Cornell Medical College researchers and community-based health care partners.

With the grant renewal, TRIPLL adds a focus on behavior change science, seeking to apply insights from psychology, sociology, economics and communications to develop optimal pain management techniques. For instance, knowing how and why older adults decide on various medications, therapies, exercises and other methods to limit pain can help individuals and their caregivers to weigh their preferred treatments. TRIPLL investigators also plan to explore how new communication tools, including social media and smartphones, can be harnessed to manage pain.

"In spite of how widespread chronic pain is among older adults, there are relatively few tested interventions to help people reduce their pain," said TRIPLL Co-Director Dr. Karl Pillemer, the Hazel E. Reed Professor of Human Development in the College of Human Ecology and a professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell. "Our new focus is exciting because we hope to translate findings into more effective interventions by deepening our understanding of human behavior and decision- making."

More than 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, more than those affected by heart disease, diabetes and cancer combined. Yet relatively few researchers study pain management, with most focusing on well-known diseases. But untreated pain takes a physical, mental, social and economic toll on older adults, according to TRIPLL Co-Director Dr. Cary Reid, the Irving Sherwood Wright associate professor in geriatrics and an associate professor of medicine at Weill Cornell.

"Treating pain in older patients is challenging in many ways," Dr. Reid added. "There are few studies that enroll typical older patients that can help to guide management decisions. Older adults are more sensitive than younger adults to medication-related side effects, and many older individuals (along with their health care providers) believe that pain is supposed to be present in later life."

Despite these challenges, Dr. Reid said that preventive approaches are critical to lessen the many negative consequences — such as reduced mobility, depression and anxiety, sleep impairment and social isolation — of poorly controlled pain.

In its first five years, TRIPLL has funded 30 pilot studies on innovative treatments, policies and interventions for improved pain management. More than 100 investigators — faculty members and graduate students — have been mentored by TRIPLL investigators, including presentations of their work at monthly work-in-progress seminars.

The institute will continue to have strong community roots, said TRIPLL Co-Director Dr. Elaine Wethington, a professor of human development and of sociology. In Ithaca and New York City, TRIPLL researchers are partnering with health care providers, hospice and home nurse agencies and older adults themselves to match interventions to their needs. Its translational focus seeks to move evidence-based techniques directly into clinical practices, programs and policies.

"The involvement of community organizations in every aspect of research project development — from conceptualization, design, participant recruitment and eventual dissemination — is one of TRIPLL's strengths," said Dr. Wethington. "The input of community agencies and consumers leads to research that is more likely to be implemented successfully in diverse cultural settings."

Affiliated with Cornell's Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, TRIPLL includes collaborating investigators at Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University (Ithaca campus) and the Hebrew Home at Riverdale. TRIPLL also maintains ongoing partnerships with Columbia University, the Hospital for Special Surgery, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Visiting Nurse Service of New York, and the Council of Senior Centers and Services of NYC.

Dr. Louis Aronne

Dr. Louis Aronne often scoffs when he hears someone dismiss obesity as a disease.

“We say it’s a disease and critics respond, ‘Well, people just eat too much,’” said Dr. Aronne, a world-renowned obesity expert at Weill Cornell. “But there is no question that obesity is in fact a disease, and we have to be more sophisticated in our management of it.”

That’s exactly what the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell seeks to do. As director of the center, Dr. Aronne and his team are investigating the metabolic underpinnings of obesity and applying their insights to advance treatments and therapies that might change the course of the disease before patients develop diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and other associated conditions.

“We’re trying to treat the complications of obesity by treating the obesity itself,” said Dr. Aronne, the Sanford I. Weill Professor of Metabolic Research at Weill Cornell. “There is no better way to prevent diabetes.”

We sat down with Dr. Aronne to learn more about the center, obesity medicine and the innovative ways in which he’s treating the condition.

Q.: What is obesity medicine?

Dr. Aronne: Obesity medicine is a new specialty that recognizes that the condition is a disease, and that treating obesity is the best way to prevent diabetes. We’ve discovered that obesity causes damage to the circuits in the brain that control weight. As a result, the signal going from your fat cells, stomach and intestines to your brain is diminished, and so your brain tells your body to gain more weight. What we’ve also learned is that there are at least eight hormones that stop you from losing weight. It’s not that it’s someone’s fault, it’s not that they don’t want to lose weight, but there’s something physical going on.

Q.: Tell me a little about the Comprehensive Weight Control Center.

Dr. Aronne: We are one of the premier centers in the country treating obesity. We see this as a hub that develops new ideas and new treatments that clinicians can use to treat the most complex cases. We’ve done more than 60 trials of new medical and behavioral treatments, including one I developed and am the CEO of, called BMIQ.

Q.: How does BMIQ work?

Dr. Aronne: BMIQ is a comprehensive medical weight-loss program that allows doctors, nurse practitioners and dietitians from any healthcare setting to manage their patients. The program offers numerous tools, including diet plans and other educational information for the healthcare professionals. For patients, we include food trackers, a curriculum of 20 sessions to learn how to manage their weight and other support mechanisms. And for the patient it’s free; the institution pays for it. We’re not out there competing with Weight Watchers; what we’re trying to do is give healthcare providers the tools to treat their patients’ weight problems.

Q.: Is weight loss only about diet and exercise?

Dr. Aronne: In the past, all we’ve done is said, “Eat less and exercise more.” That’s never going to work. If it were that simple, I wouldn’t have a job. Whether it’s new medical or surgical therapies, to obesity medicine more widely accepted we need to educate physicians and we need to allow them to have the resources that centers like ours utilize.

Q.: You mentioned weight-loss drugs. Do they work?

Dr. Aronne: Medicines didn’t really make sense 10, 15, 20 years ago, but they do now. We know that hypothalamic POMC neurons, which play a fundamental role in the control of energy balance, are damaged in obesity. Medications appear to amplify or mimic signals through the hypothalamus, reducing appetite and increasing energy expenditure. In the future, we think that people will take these medicines to treat obesity – and to prevent hypertension, diabetes and high cholesterol from developing. We’re also working on new, minimally invasive devices and minimally invasive surgical procedures with gastroenterologists, in addition to new medicines.

Q.: Can you describe those techniques?

Dr. Aronne: For one, we insert a tube into the stomach. Normally, when someone can’t eat, we can put a tube into their stomach and put food in, but doctors at Sloan Kettering and Washington University in St. Louis came up with the idea of taking food out. The food is digested enough so people can feel full and they don’t overeat. We also investigated a tube that’s like an inner liner for 2 feet of the intestine. When food doesn’t touch the upper intestine, blood sugar comes down and weight is lost.

Q.: What do you see as the interplay between cancer, diabetes and metabolic disease?

Dr. Aronne: There is very little question that mechanisms found in obesity and diabetes stimulate the growth of tumor cells. By managing those problems, it looks like you can reduce the risk of getting cancer and the risk of recurrence of the cancer. Interestingly, oncologists are most interested in what we’re doing. It looks like being obese will reduce your chances of survival, and the treatments for cancer in many cases cause women to gain weight. Would we get better outcomes if we could stop the weight gain that results from these treatments? That’s why we developed BMIQ, to deliver quality weight management in just such a medical setting.

Q.: What makes diabetes and obesity prime targets for precision medicine?

Dr. Aronne: The same treatment doesn’t work in everybody. One diet may seem to work better for one person; another diet works better for another. Physical activity definitely helps. Trying to change behavior definitely helps. Medication can help some people. Surgery can help some people. Virtually anybody who has a weight problem can lose weight. But there’s no single cure for everyone.

Q.: Would you describe obesity as one of our greatest health challenges?

Dr. Aronne: It is absolutely the biggest one. It drives heart disease, diabetes, cancers. Right now, we’re waiting until those develop and then treating them. But if we can get at obesity and manage it before these things develop, it’s going to cost the healthcare system a lot less money. I think in the future we’re going to look at people who are extremely obese and we’re going to say, “What were we thinking waiting until somebody got like this? Why did we do that?” Especially with children, I think that we may start getting more aggressive earlier in their lives. 

The Muslim tradition of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan may provide insight into the human body’s metabolic processes, offering new clues into how obesity and type 2 diabetes develop, say researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.

In a study published last month in the Journal of Translational Medicine, the researchers suggest that the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, during which observers abstain from eating and drinking from dawn to sunset, may offer a unique opportunity to study on a cellular level and in a controlled setting just what happens to the human body during extended fasting — and after that fast is broken. Researchers hope this information will help them better understand the molecular underpinnings of metabolic diseases, and establish better diagnostic tools to catch them earlier in their progression.

“The ability to enroll large numbers of people who are already fasting into metabolomics studies is extremely useful and could lead to some very significant new discoveries,” said Dr. Karsten Suhre, professor of physiology and biophysics and director of the Bioinformatics Core at WCMC-Q, whose laboratory oversaw the study. “For instance, many Muslim patients with diabetes observe fasting at Ramadan, which presents very valuable opportunities to study the disease under conditions that are usually very difficult to find.”

Small molecules called metabolites are involved in many essential, life-sustaining metabolic processes, including breaking down food for energy and harvesting proteins from food to build tissues, such as muscles. They can also play a role in metabolic diseases, with doctors using their concentrations as biomarkers on which they can base a diagnosis. Eating food changes the behavior of metabolites, complicating doctors’ efforts to make accurate diagnoses for diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.

In a pilot study conducted in 2009 with collaborators in Germany, the investigators found that Ramadan’s religious precepts established a natural setting for the function of metabolites during an extended fast. They hope the pilot study can serve as a starting point for a large-scale study conducted during a future Ramadan.

“This type of regulated and universal fasting presents significant opportunities for coordinated enrollment of study participants and administration of a controlled meal,” said lead author Sweety Mathew, senior project coordinator in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at WCMC-Q. “This has great potential for returning very useful results.”

Scientists at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar have discovered how a diabetes drug that has been widely prescribed for more than 50 years protects patients' circulatory systems from damage caused by high blood sugar.

Metformin, the hypoglycemic drug prescribed to most patients with type 2 diabetes, interacts with a family of enzymes that has regulatory control over a wide range of critical cellular functions. The interaction between metformin and the enzymes, called sirtuins, protects patients from irreversible damage to the insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells caused by high blood sugars, an effect known as glucose toxicity.

The study was published online last month in the British Journal of Pharmacology by Weill Cornell-Qatar's Dr. Chris Triggle, professor of pharmacology; Dr. Hong Ding, assistant research professor of pharmacology; and postdoctoral fellow and lead author Dr. Gnanapragasam Arunachalam.

"Our publication not only enhances our knowledge of how treatment with metformin reduces cardiovascular risk in patients with type 2 diabetes, but also provides a potential target for new therapeutic entities that can mimic metformin's action on sirtuin1," a protein in the sirtuin family, said Dr. Triggle, who is the lead principal investigator of a Qatar Foundation-sponsored National Priorities Research Program project exploring the effects of diabetes on the vascular system.

Metformin was first introduced in 1958 to treat type 2 diabetes. It has fewer serious side effects than other diabetes medications, significantly less risk of causing low blood sugar than other drugs, and is associated with weight loss rather than weight gain. (Obesity is associated with the disease.)

Researchers have generally assumed that the beneficial effects of metformin are linked to its ability to prevent the liver from creating glucose from foods other than carbohydrates, which means less glucose in the blood and ultimately less deterioration of the vascular system. However, previous clinical studies of the drug suggested to Dr. Triggle and his team that a different mechanism was at work.

Using mouse cells cultivated in the laboratory, they confirmed that metformin has a direct effect on vascular function through interaction with a protein called sirtuin1, which is encoded by the SIRT1 gene known to play a role in aging. The study was also unusual in that it assessed the effects of the drug at therapeutic clinical concentrations.

"We realized some years ago that the reported and generally accepted mechanisms of metformin did not really fit with the pharmacokinetic profile — the way the drug interacts with the body," Dr. Triggle said. "Our study proves that metformin does indeed have a direct protective action on the vasculature."

A non-invasive test that can provide an early warning of heart attacks in Caucasian diabetics is just as effective for Arab and South Asian diabetic populations, say researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.

The AGE Reader, a device first developed in the Netherlands by DiagnOptics in 1996 and approved for commercial use a decade later, is designed to provide patients with major chronic diseases with an immediate cardiovascular risk prediction by analyzing the concentration of a specific protein in their bodies. But while its application had been validated among Caucasian populations in the United States and Europe, it was unclear if it could predict vascular risks in people with darker skin with similar accuracy.

In a new study, researchers from Weill Cornell in Qatar say that the device can, in fact, successfully predict vascular risk among diabetic Arabs and South Asians by taking the difference in skin color into consideration.

"The manufacturers of the machine at first believed that the ethnicity of the person being tested would be inconsequential to the results delivered," said Dr. Dennis Mook-Kanamori, a research associate at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. "We showed, however, that a person's ethnicity did affect the results — but that the machine could be recalibrated to provide an accurate indication of potential future cardiovascular problems whatever a person's ethnicity."

Here's how the AGE Reader works: A patient rests his or her arm on the device, which shines an ultraviolet light on the person's skin. The skin's glow can then be used to determine the body's concentration of advanced glycation end products, miniscule fragments of degrading, sugar-containing proteins that accumulate in the body over a lifetime. The higher the concentration of these fragments, the more likely a patient is to have heart problems later in life.

Diabetics are at particular risk for a higher concentration due to spikes in their blood sugar levels. Researchers say the test is akin to using cholesterol levels to predict people's risk of cardiovascular problems.

To investigate the efficacy of the AGE Reader among darker-skinned populations, lead investigator Dr. Karsten Suhre, professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell in Qatar, in conjunction with Hamad Medical Corporation's dermatology department, tested the device on 200 Arabs, 99 South Asians, 37 Filipinos and 14 people from other countries. Approximately half of the subjects were men and half were women, and none were Caucasian.

"To our knowledge, this was the largest study performed so far that uses the AGE Reader in South Asians, Filipinos and Arabs," Dr. Suhre said.

The researchers discovered that skin auto-fluorescence differs among ethnicities, and therefore the existing statistical reference curve used to analyze protein particles in Caucasian patients would have to be modified to take skin color into account. The researchers add that larger studies in specific ethnicities are required to create the modified statistical reference values.

With type 2 diabetes increasing in prevalence in Qatar and the Gulf States, these researchers say it's more important than ever to identify techniques for early detection and prevention of complications from the disease.

"For diabetics in particular, this is an important tool," Dr. Mook-Kanamori said. "By applying the AGE Reader test, doctors can give their patients an early warning of potential heart problems and take action to reduce those problems."

The research was conducted as a side study to Dr. Suhre's main focus, which involves searching for biomarkers — telltale molecules present in samples of blood, urine or saliva that are associated with the metabolic processes known to cause diabetes — in order to develop additional early-detection tests for the disease.

Weill Cornell Medical College researcher Dr. Shuibing Chen's pursuit of a treatment or cure for type 2 diabetes received a boost a few weeks ago after receiving one of 51 New Innovator awards from the National Institutes of Health.

The award carries $1.5 million in funding over five years supporting Dr. Chen's research into type 2 diabetes — which affects more than 25 million Americans and consumes more than $210 billion in United States health care costs every year — and how to prevent or treat it.

"This new award is extremely important for my laboratory," said Dr. Chen, assistant professor of chemical biology in surgery and assistant professor of chemical biology in biochemistry at Weill Cornell. "Finding the cure for type 2 diabetes mellitus is the core mission of my laboratory. This innovator award recognizes the significance of this mission."

Established in 2007, the New Innovator award initiative supports investigators who are within 10 years of their terminal degree or clinical residency, but who have not yet received a research project grant or equivalent grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct exceptionally innovative research.

Type 2 diabetes is a metabolic disorder, often caused by obesity, that's characterized by high blood glucose in the context of insulin resistance and relative insulin deficiency. While those involved in health care, as well as policymakers, are working on ways to curb the obesity epidemic, Dr. Chen is working behind the scenes to see if type 2 diabetes, once it's developed in a patient, can be reversed.

To determine that, Dr. Chen will study the role of the environment and genetic factors in the progression and regression of cellular dysfunction characteristic of type 2 diabetes in mouse models humanized through stem cells. Using these models, Dr. Chen and her team hope to identify the "tipping point," of type 2 diabetes' progression, thereby learning how to prevent or treat the chronic disease.

"The classic pathogenesis of type 2 diabetes mellitus involves insulin resistance and pancreatic β cell dysfunction," Dr. Chen said. "Pancreatic β cell dysfunction is a key step determining the progression from metabolic impairments to a disease state. We will create two novel models to monitor the progression and regression of pancreatic β cell dysfunction in real-time. By studying the mechanism controlling the progression, we will learn how to prevent type 2 diabetes mellitus. Understanding the mechanism controlling the regression of pancreatic β cell dysfunction will help us to identify novel drug target to reverse the disease state."

I'm Dr. Laurie Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, and today I'm speaking to Dr. Anthony Sauve, associate professor of Pharmacology here at Weill Cornell. Dr. Sauve recently discovered that high doses of a vitamin normally found in milk can have implications in the fight against obesity. Dr. Sauve's study, which is still in the animal testing phase, epitomizes the promise of our cutting edge bench to bedside research that we hope will enhance human health for decades to come.

LAURIE H. GLIMCHER: There's an exciting buzz about your research and its implications for metabolism. What can you tell me about it?

ANTHONY SAUVE: Our laboratory has been focused on a compound called nicotinamide riboside, which I'll call NR. What this compound is able to do is go into cells. We collaborated with a group in Switzerland showing that the compound is able to get into the body of mice that are fed high-fat diets and enable them to resist the negative health consequences of high-fat diet, leading to much healthier animals. And we're hopeful that we can move that forward into humans.

GLIMCHER: The obesity epidemic in America — and increasingly in other countries — has received a lot of attention both in the media and in government, and in NYC, with efforts by our mayor to limit the accessibility of large soda drinks. How does your study play into the national dialogue?

SAUVE: Where we fit in is having something that's already in milk, other food products, that can be made more highly available, has the effects of making you more insulin sensitive, reduce weight gain, things that predispose you to that type 2 diabetic situation, is going to be extremely valuable because it becomes possible to bring that into people's lives before they actually have to go see doctors.

GLIMCHER: What methods are you going to be using to answer those questions and move this along to the next stage?

SAUVE: Our approach is multi-dimensional. We take a chemistry approach in many ways. One way we have been able to do that is to develop efficient ways to make NR in large quantities. NR has been known for a very long time but has only been available in very tiny amounts. So this is probably more NR than was in existence in one place 10 years ago, like nowhere in the world. [laughs]

GLIMCHER: I better not drop this then. Wow. So this is the magic substance, huh?

SAUVE: That's the magic stuff.

GLIMCHER: That's great. Maybe I should take a sip of it now.

SAUVE: I know, I know, I know, take some. [Glimcher and Sauve laugh]

GLIMCHER: Tell me a little about yourself. Where did you grow up? How did you become passionate about science?

SAUVE: I grew up in Southern California, in a town called Thousand Oaks. I played high school football, I ran track, my family was very interested in fishing. They took us to the ocean quite a bit and we did quite a bit of fishing on the surf. I was a very avid learner. When I got to college, it was fairly clear that I wanted to be engaged in biologic research. My interests in chemistry took the upper hand at that point. But I stayed always very close to biochemistry. I did my graduate work at Princeton and eventually realized I definitely wanted to stay closer to the biological sciences. I went to do a postdoc in biochemistry at Albert Einstein. These days, it's a little bit of all of those things: biochemistry, biology, chemistry. It all happens in my laboratory, and I think it's exciting to get to come to work every day and do that kind of thing.

GLIMCHER: A perfect example of the kind of cross-disciplinary research that I'm very eager to see occurring at Weill Cornell Medical College. It's so critical that we work together across all disciplines, and you're a good example of that happening in one laboratory. How did you get interested in this particular field of research?

SAUVE: That's a really interesting question and it's an unusual path, if you will. It was being in the right place at the right time, if you will. Well, I started my postdoc working on a different set of enzymes, but there was one common theme, and that was NAD. And so NAD was front and center at that point ... I went to work on NAD and looked at NAD signaling, and about three years into my postdoc, this family of enzymes called sirtuins was discovered. And the only thing that changed was the enzyme focus, but it was still NAD ... We've been working on NAD signaling now for 15 years. I think what's really great is that there are still new chapters to be written. It's always evolving. I am so happy with this current study because we moved out of theoretical land and into where possible treatments can become visible. You can actually go, 'Well, gee, what would happen if we did this in people?'

GLIMCHER: So you think there is a very important role for chemistry in biomedical research, to get back to the cross disciplinary theme.

SAUVE: I think chemistry is crucial. I think that biologists have liked to work with us through the years because we have brought chemistry into, in essence, the playground. If you're going to do research and you want to do something that's novel and you can only buy stuff, that's not going to be very enabling. If you can create things and bring those into the situation, you can change the ability of researchers to impact knowledge and change, potentially, therapeutic options. I think chemistry has a huge role to play in biologic research, and I think this is one of those examples where chemistry did play a key role because there was no real way to get this compound. And having a chemist say, 'We can make a lot more of this than just a few milligrams,' makes the big difference if you want to look at animals and then eventually people. You just need to have the ability to make things.

GLIMCHER: I understand you have licensed this exciting new discovery to a company, which I think is terrific. Can you explain how and why you think this is going to be helpful in moving this into humans sooner rather than later, thereby enhancing human health?

SAUVE: What I think is really important about academia is recognizing what academia is. This is an academic laboratory. The challenge in academic laboratories tends to focus on producing knowledge and enabling things that weren't possible before. And that's not to say companies don't do that. But this company should be able to take what we've done and scale it a thousand fold. So we have been able to make just short of a kilogram of NR in my laboratory. That's a lot of material. A kilogram is not enough to do studies in human beings. So we talked to the CEO of this company [ChromaDex Inc.] who is developing NR for commercial use. They want to make metric tons of NR for commercial use. To me, that's clearly something we can't do. The laboratories of an industrial company can do that. I think what's key here and what we've recognized here is that the ability of researchers to develop technology, have it protected and then have it be understood by outside commercial companies that can recognize its value becomes incredibly important for bringing research to people. I think what's also important, again focusing on this study, enabling research that illustrates the value of the compounds. If there's a compound that doesn't have that key breakthrough study, that compound isn't necessarily less promising. But the compound that has that key study gets a little bit more attention, a little more boost because, in reality, that process of bringing NR to humans is going to take a large number of people, all wanting to see what that compound can do. That's what we're hoping this company can accomplish, that they can use their strengths — which is dealing with other companies, medical facilities, food companies, nutraceutical companies — [so] that the promise of this compound can eventually be realized.

GLIMCHER: I understand that you worked with faculty on the Ithaca campus on this study. How was your experience doing that, and how do you think we can further expand and strengthen those kinds of interactions with our parent university?

SAUVE: The emphasis at Ithaca on agriculture, food products, understanding how nutrition can impact human health, is going to actually have a nice strong intersection with our laboratory interests. So we are really looking forward to seeing how that can build up into something.

GLIMCHER: You've been at Weill Cornell for several years now. What do you like best?

SAUVE: Weill is a terrific environment for collaborative biomedical research. In making a compound and finding that it has a strong effect on NAD and metabolism doesn't mean we can answer all the questions that we'd like to ask. Being able to find experts in mitochondrial research, experts in neuroscience, makes it so much easier for NR to march down the road towards realizing its potential.

GLIMCHER: I think Weill Cornell has a bright future ahead with the Belfer Research Building, doubling our research space. I'd like your thoughts on what we can do here at Weill Cornell to further your research and the research of other faculty members most effectively.

SAUVE: Putting people with complementary strengths in a proximity where they can actually do research together more easily, that's going to be important. Developing core strengths that everyone can participate in. Things like chemistry cores, microscopy cores, various kinds of cores that everyone can use and that make research easier to do. I think we have that, but I also think it's extremely important for the university to invest in those kinds of things. Those are the kinds of things that ultimately can limit what research can be done.

GLIMCHER: I think you will be glad to hear that the 16th floor of the Belfer Research Building is going to have 40 chemical fume hoods.

SAUVE: Chemistry should also be very important in — I think — Cornell's future.

GLIMCHER: Well, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule. I loved hearing about the work, and I'm very excited about the possibilities. This area is extremely important, has enormous public health ramifications and is something that I would like to see strengthened at Weill Cornell going forward.

Treating Obesity

"We see people who have tried everything to lose weight but haven't succeeded," says Dr. Louis J. Aronne, clinical professor of medicine and director of the Comprehensive Weight-Control Program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. "It is very gratifying to be able to help them accomplish their goals, using tools that were not available even four or five years ago. It is amazing to see it work."

Dr. Aronne is working to better understand the "feed forward" mechanism that may be driving weight gain: The more fattening foods you eat, the more your body craves the same unhealthy foods.

"Obesity is a complicated disease," he explains. "There are a complex series of mechanisms that stop people from losing weight. By understanding what those systems are and how they interact, we will be able to treat obesity more effectively in the future."

Complications of obesity are widespread and can include stroke, heart disease, arthritis, cancer and diabetes. Today, some of the most promising developments are in the areas of diabetes and obesity. "In the past, being treated with insulin alone for diabetes often led to weight gain," says Dr. Aronne. "Ideally, we want someone who is being treated for diabetes to also lose weight. We now have ways to combine treatments — such as less-invasive surgical procedures and better medications — that are leading to weight loss in addition to good control of glucose."

The Research Leads to Cures Initiative

Dr. Aronne and other Weill Cornell physicians are making great advances in understanding, treating and preventing obesity, diabetes and a host of other debilitating diseases. These researchers are the heart of the Research Leads to Cures initiative — a new and critical phase of the Discoveries that Make a Difference campaign.

Learn more about the people leading this revolution in translational research and patient care, and find out how you can help fulfill the promise of the many medical discoveries that are under way here at Weill Cornell.