The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a seven-year contract valued at more than $42 million to advance basic research into influenza and COVID-19, and prepare for future pandemics. This marks the third time Mount Sinai has received a seven-year NIAID contract under the leadership of Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute and Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine, who serves as Principal Investigator. Florian Krammer, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor in Vaccinology; and Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, Pathology, and Medicine (Infectious Diseases), will serve as the contract’s co-investigators. Learn more.

 

An international consortium of investigators in academia, industry, and government, led and coordinated by Albert Einstein College of Medicine scientists, has developed a monoclonal antibody-based therapy against Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), a highly virulent tick-borne pathogen affecting eastern and southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Central Asia. Up to 40% of CCHFV cases prove fatal and there are currently no treatments or vaccines. The drug was tested in mice and the results were described in a new study published online in Cell. Learn more.

 

Over the past year, the medical community marshaled its full array of resources to combat COVID-19, the virus that has resulted in millions of deaths worldwide. With New York, and Westchester in particular, at the epicenter of the major outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States last March, infectious diseases expert Abhay Dhand, M.D., associate professor of clinical medicine at New York Medical College and director of transplant infectious diseases and the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Westchester Medical Center, quickly found himself in a frontline role treating COVID-19 patients. Learn more.

 

The Western New York COVID-19 Research Collaborative has received a $55,000 grant from The John R. Oishei Foundation to promote vaccine acceptance in the region. Through the project, the collaborative will interview community leaders to discuss concerns regarding COVID-19 vaccination among medically underserved populations, distribute educational materials on vaccine development, and host informative events that allow community members to ask researchers and clinicians questions about vaccination. Learn more.

 

Upstate Medical University infectious disease physician-scientist Stephen J. Thomas, MD, is a co-author of a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the safety and efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in adolescents ages 12 to 15. Thomas is the coordinating principal investigator for the late-stage Pfizer/BioNTech global vaccine trial and the principal investigator at Upstate, which enrolled 12- to 15-year-olds in the study. Learn more.

 

A multidisciplinary team at Mount Sinai is conducting the first large-scale prospective study to examine the impact of COVID-19 infection during pregnancy on maternal and child outcomes. The study is funded by a $1.8 million contract from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and is expected to be conducted through May 2022. The team calls it “Generation C” because it is studying the maternal experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Learn more.

 

Locally and nationwide, the number of COVID-19 cases is plummeting and the predominant message seems to be that the worst of the pandemic may be behind us. Yet while vaccinated individuals are enjoying returning to many normal activities, University at Buffalo scientists doing genomic sequencing of COVID-19 samples note that the actual picture locally is more nuanced. Learn more.

 

A novel urine screening test that uses a protein, keratin 17 (K17), as a cancer biomarker reveals the test detects the presence of new or recurrent cases of bladder cancer. The methodology behind the test stems from research at Stony Brook University led by Kenneth Shroyer, MD, PhD. A study that details the finding of the test is published in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology. Learn more.

 

Seven students from the College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM) helped conduct research that could bring scientists closer to developing more effective, less toxic treatments for some of the world’s deadliest cancers. Their report, published May 14 in the journal Cancers, provides a wide-ranging scientific review of 215 studies on the biological processes that enable certain cancers to spread. Learn more.

 

The latest method under investigation to attack leukemia is a bit like exterminating cockroaches: It’s a three-step process using cutting-edge technology to bait, trap, and kill leukemia cells at their root. A paper published in Sciences Advances, led by Wilmot Cancer Institute researchers, describes the process and the significance for patients who face acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive type of blood cancer in which only 28 percent of people survive five years. Learn more.

 

Brief pulses of ultrasound delivered to nerves near the kidney produced a clinically meaningful drop in blood pressure in people whose hypertension did not respond to a triple cocktail of medications, reports a new study led by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork-Presbyterian. Learn more.

 

A national team of researchers including Ira S. Cohen, MD, PhD, of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, has identified a compound that prevents the lengthening of the heart’s electrical event, or action potential, which can cause a lengthening of the EKG’s Q-T interval and a dangerous and sometimes deadly arrhythmia called Torsades de Pointes. Many drugs that are effective against cancer, infections and other diseases, can induce a lengthening of the heart’s action potential as an adverse side effect, thus rendering these drugs unsafe or with risks outweighing their benefits for patients. Learn more.

 

About 12,000 bacteria and viruses collected in a sampling from public transit systems and hospitals around the world from 2015 to 2017 had never before been identified, according to a study by the International MetaSUB Consortium, a global effort at tracking microbes that is led by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. For the study, published May 26 in Cell, international investigators collected nearly 5,000 samples over a three-year period across 60 cities in 32 countries and six continents. Learn more.

 

Einstein and Montefiore researchers are finding that the intestinal microbiome may hold the key to good health—and that altering it may help treat sickle cell disease, diabetes, obesity, and more. Learn more.

 

A team of infectious disease experts and engineers at Columbia University have received a $4.7 million grant(link is external and opens in a new window) from the NIH to investigate the use of urban wastewater as a cost-effective and rapid means to detect new outbreaks of SARS-CoV-2. The project is led by Anne-Catrin Uhlemann, MD, associate professor of medicine in the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Kartik Chandran, PhD, professor of environmental engineering in the School of Engineering. Learn more.

 

University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) neurologist Gretchen Birbeck, M.D., M.P.H., has received a $4.3 million award from the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to continue her research in sub-Saharan Africa on the neurological problems that arise in people recovering from malaria, HIV, and other infectious diseases, including COVID. Learn more.

 

Eight Weill Cornell Medicine faculty members have received Young Physician-Scientist Awards from the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the most awarded to any institution this year. The 2021 award recipients are Drs. Oleh Akchurin, Parag Goyal, Jiwon Kim, John Lee, Jyoti Mathad, Santosh Murthy, Anna Nam and Lisa Giulino Roth. One of the nation’s oldest nonprofit medical honor societies with more than 3,000 physician-scientists from all medical specialties, the ASCI seeks to support the scientific efforts, educational and mentorship needs and clinical aspirations of physician-scientists to improve the health of all people. Learn more.

 

After learning that her twin brother suffered from schizophrenia and that there was no cure, Upstate professor and researcher Cynthia “Cyndi” Shannon Weickert, PhD, dedicated her career to better understanding the biology underlying the disease. Now, the professor of neuroscience and physiology is being honored by the Schizophrenia International Research Society with the 2021 Outstanding Translational Research Award. Learn more.

 

In a new study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Weikang Cai, Ph.D., assistant professor of biomedical sciences at the College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM), will examine how chronic stress impacts brain chemistry and contributes to clinical depression. The research project, which is estimated to receive $1.6 million in NIH funds over five years, could help identify breakthrough treatments for clinical depression, which affects more than 260 million people worldwide. Learn more.

 

Epilepsy—in which brain activity becomes abnormal, causing seizures or periods of unusual behavior sensations, and sometimes loss of awareness—afflicts approximately 3.5 million people in the United States, including 500,000 children, making it one of the most common neurological disorders. NYMC, Westchester Medical Center and Boston Children’s Health Physicians have collaborated to create a research program in pediatric and adult epilepsy, which brings clinicians and basic science researchers together to work to develop new, more effective epilepsy treatments. Learn more.