Weill Cornell Medicine

Join us in celebrating the exceptional achievements of our community members! ⭐ Dr. Amanda Buch was selected as a HHMI Janelia Leading Edge Fellow. ⭐ Dr. Carolina Cabalín and Dr. Mateo Alejandro Martínez-Roque were selected as 2024 Pew Latin American Fellows in the Biomedical Sciences. ⭐ Dr. Branden Sosa was the recipient of the National Medical Fellowships, Inc. Dr. James Curtis Scholarship. https://bit.ly/3ROZVzT

Maureen Mealey had just started a new job as a restaurant server in Manhattan when she began feeling the symptoms of a seizure. Maureen, who has a history of seizures, feared one was brewing as she tried to keep track of food orders and talk to her colleagues. "I was training so I thought I was just having anxiety," she recalls. "The last thing I remember was me questioning whether or not I was going to have a seizure." Meanwhile, Dr. Sean Cullen, a neonatologist, and Dr. Juliana Romano, a pediatric critical care specialist, both of Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and Ann Gallagher, a critical care nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian, were in the restaurant together when they noticed a group surrounding someone on the floor. They immediately rushed over. "The three of us have worked together in a lot of patient situations," says Dr. Romano. While she worked with the restaurant staff to locate Maureen's seizure rescue medication, "Annie and I worked together to place Maureen in a safe position," recalls Dr. Cullen. "We both checked for pulses and confirmed she was breathing." After the team administered the nasal spray medication, Maureen regained consciousness. "Normally you wake up to someone who's telling you, 'Oh, you're ok,' but they're telling you you're okay while they are nervous," says Maureen. "But I got to wake up to someone with a very calming energy." That person was Ann Gallagher. "I remember Annie speaking to Maureen slowly and calmly, while providing a kind, reassuring touch on her arms," says Dr. Cullen. Maureen says she remembers Ann slowly sitting her up when the ambulance arrived. "She was just very supportive, and I really appreciated that," Maureen says. The group also helped call Maureen's mother to tell her what happened and reassure her Maureen was well. "We just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I am confident that any of my colleagues would've done exactly what we did," says Ann. Maureen has since worked with our neurologist, Dr. Padmaja Kandula, to get on the right medication combination. She has fully recovered and is back to happily serving customers. "I'm so thankful," Maureen says.

Congratulations to Dr. Margaret McNairy on being selected as an Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine Scholar by the National Academy of Medicine. An esteemed global health physician-scientist, Dr. McNairy’s research focuses on improving delivery of primary care, including HIV and cardiovascular diseases, in resource-constrained settings. For the past decade, she has worked with the Haiti-based medical organization GHESKIO, which was founded in 1982 as the first institution in the developing world dedicated to the fight against HIV/AIDS. Dr. McNairy’s innovative work has broadened the program’s focus in recent years by investigating cardiovascular disease outcomes in Haiti’s low-income population. Join us in congratulating Dr. McNairy on this prestigious honor! Full story: https://bit.ly/3Wkn5kA

A team of scientists has customized a secure ChatGPT, an AI language model developed to understand and generate text, to provide accurate responses to questions about digital pathology and compile detailed reports. Digital pathology is a rapidly growing field that uses high-resolution digital images created from tissue samples to help diagnose disease and guide treatment. General large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT have two major problems. "First, they often provide lengthy generic responses that don’t contain useful information,” said Dr. Mohamed Omar of Weill Cornell Medicine. “Second, these models can hallucinate and make things up out of nowhere, including literature citations. This is especially bad in specialized fields like digital pathology and cancer biology, for example.” To create AI tools that could increase the efficiency and accuracy needed for the nuanced decision-making necessary in digital pathology, researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute developed and tested a refined, private LLM that provided accurate and precise responses to user prompts about digital pathology. “My hope is that this will be a catalyst for more domain-specific tools in other fields of medicine or medical research,” Dr. Omar said. https://bit.ly/4cWbWvp

Join us in celebrating Dr. Rahul Sharma for receiving the Advancing Emergency Care Award from the New York American College of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Sharma is a national leader in emergency medicine, healthcare operations, virtual healthcare and the development of novel care delivery models. “This is such a meaningful recognition of our department, faculty and staff who advance our specialty and the core mission of our organization," said Dr. Sharma. "I am grateful for the wonderful colleagues that I work with not only at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, but across our state and country." In 2008, the New York American College of Emergency Physicians established the Advancing Emergency Care Award to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to advancing emergency care in the state. Congratulations to Rahul Sharma, MD, MBA, FACEP on this tremendous honor! https://bit.ly/462xm7T

Vaccinating mothers against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) during late pregnancy to protect their newborns is not associated with an increased risk of preterm birth or other poor outcomes. The new study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital adds real-world evidence to the existing data from clinical trials about the safety of Pfizer’s Abrysvo vaccine. Every year, RSV infections cause up to 80,000 hospitalizations and up to 300 deaths in children under five. Infants are particularly vulnerable to the virus which can cause a serious lower respiratory illness. In August 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the Abrysvo vaccine for women between 32 and 36 weeks of pregnancy based on clinical trial results. To further study the vaccine’s safety in actual practice, Dr. Son and her colleagues analyzed pregnancy outcomes in 1,026 vaccinated and 1,947 unvaccinated patients using de-identified data. https://bit.ly/3XH8D72

When Crystal Richardson met with our endometriosis specialist Dr. Eung-Mi Lee, she was desperate for relief from heavy, painful periods. She felt tired and lightheaded and suffered from searing pelvic pain. Crystal saw many doctors, but no one could help her. It wasn’t until Dr. Lee of Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital ordered an MRI that Crystal finally got a diagnosis and specialized treatment. As it turns out, she was dealing with a case of endometriosis, which occurs when a uterine-like lining grows outside of the uterus. But since her surgery, which included the removal of her cervix and fallopian tubes, Crystal has been working, exercising and living pain-free. Now, she tells friends with painful periods to make sure they get the treatment they need. “Don’t wait until the pain is debilitating,” she says. “There is help out there. Dr. Lee gave me my life.” Read the full story in the summer issue of IMPACT: https://bit.ly/3WeNdgx

Researchers have used liver biopsies to identify cellular and molecular markers that can potentially be used to predict whether and when pancreatic cancer will spread to an individual’s liver or elsewhere. The new study suggests that information from a liver biopsy when pancreatic cancer is diagnosed may help guide doctors in personalizing treatment, such as liver-directed immunotherapies, before cancer cells have the chance to metastasize. “If we can predict the timing and location of metastases, that could be a real game changer in treating pancreatic cancer, particularly patients at high metastatic risk,” said Weill Cornell Medicine's Dr. David Lyden, who led the study with Dr. Linda Bojmar and researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. https://bit.ly/4bhQwYz

Are you looking for a unique and insightful summer read? Our summer issue of IMPACT, our digital magazine, delves into compelling stories showcasing our unwavering dedication to exceptional patient care, pioneering research and shaping the future of healthcare leadership. Highlights include: ✨ Science Over Stigma: Probing the physical causes of obesity ✨ The Sounds of Science: Giving voice to disease screening ✨ Bones’ Secret Cells: New connections to cancer and birth defects Dive into these fascinating articles: https://bit.ly/3XQGM4E

Scientists uncover an intermediate reversible state in a cell before it fully commits to the process of dividing itself into two new cells. This discovery of a fundamental aspect of cell biology could have implications for understanding cancer, wound healing, and other cell division-related processes. Researchers led by Dr. Tobias Meyer of Weill Cornell Medicine developed new tools allowing them to track over time the activation state of E2F, a transcription factor protein long known as the master switch for initiating division in mammalian cells. They found unexpectedly that E2F, before being fully activated, can remain in a potentially lengthy state of partial and reversible activation that may end in full commitment to cell division or a reversion to the usual, non-dividing, “quiescent” state. Although the role of this pre-commitment state of cell division is not yet entirely clear, it appears to be a safety mechanism to avoid inappropriate cell division, and may also activate DNA-repair functions. https://bit.ly/3XQOj3j