News from the Medical Schools: Research

The Associated Medical Schools of New York (AMSNY) brings you the following compilation of the most recent updates and news on research from the academic medical centers in the state.

May 19, 2015 – Dr. Olga Boudker, an associate professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medical College, has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a prestigious honor that comes with unrestricted, flexible and long-term research support. Dr. Boudker’s research in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics focuses on how glutamate pumps, which play an important role in brain function, work on the molecular level. This research will help researchers develop new therapies to treat patients with brain disease and injury.

Medical Student awarded Year-long Hughes Research Fellowship

April 29, 2015 – The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has selected second-year University at Buffalo medical student Niema Razavian for its Medical Research Fellows Program.

Funds for Research

NIH awards $2.2 million grant to William J. Brunken, PhD, for vision research

May 19, 2015 – William J. Brunken, Ph.D., of Upstate Medical University, has been awarded a $2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a five-year study investigating the role of extracellular matrix (ECM) in retinal development and disease. The award is supported by the NIH’s National Eye Institute. Brunken is vice chair for research for the Department of Ophthalmology, director of the department’s Center for Vision Research and professor of ophthalmology, neuroscience and physiology.

Scientists Receive $15.7M to Develop Stem Cell Therapies to Treat Blood Disorders

May 13, 2015 – A consortium of scientists and transplant clinicians from the Ansary Stem Cell Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Center for Cell Engineering at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has been awarded a $15.7 million, four-year research grant from the New York State Stem Cell Science Program (NYSTEM) to translate their innovative approach to expand and manipulate hematopoietic stem cells to cure acquired and inherited blood disorders.

New Mouse Model with Healthy Immune System Developed for Colon Cancer Research

May 26, 2015 – A research team led by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators has developed a mouse model with a healthy immune system and used that specimen to study how human colon cancer cells are spread — or not — based on immune function. The corresponding study, published May 25 in Nature Biotechnology, shows that the new model offers a better way than previous models to screen and test cancer drugs, immunotherapies and tumor vaccines, offering new hope for the development of successful colon cancer treatments.

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© 2015 Weill Cornell Medical College. All rights reserved.

Scientists are Designing Decoy Drugs to Fool Cancer

May 26, 2015 – Cancer cells are shifty characters. They use a number of dirty tricks to survive and infiltrate the body. Now Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists are fighting back with some sneaky strategies of their own. A study published in Cancer Discovery describes how Jan Kitajewski, PhD, and colleagues have created new decoy drugs that can intercept the deceptive growth signals that cancer cells send out.

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© 2015 Columbia University Medical Center. All rights reserved.

Study Discovers How Pancreatic Cancer Spreads to the Liver

May 18, 2015 – An international team led by Weill Cornell Medical College investigators has illuminated the precise molecular steps that enable pancreatic cancer to spread to the liver — the event that makes the most common form of the disease lethal. By understanding this process, investigators say their discovery can lead to targeted treatments that delay metastasis, and could offer clinicians a new biomarker to test for the earliest signs of pancreatic cancer.

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© 2015 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. All rights reserved.

3-D Printed Trachea among Key Mount Sinai Research Presented at American Association for Thoracic Surgery Meeting

May 4, 2015 – Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers presented several landmark studies at the 2015 American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) meeting in Seattle.

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Stem Cell Study Evaluates ‘Off-the-Shelf’ Heart Failure Treatment

May 8, 2015 – University at Buffalo researchers will test the effectiveness of using stem cells from donors to treat patients with heart failure.

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© 2015 School of Medicine at Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo. All rights reserved.

Gene Therapy Clips Out Heart Failure Causing Gene Mutations

April 29, 2015 – Gene therapy can clip out genetic material linked to heart failure and replace it with the normal gene in human cardiac cells, according to a study led by researchers from the Cardiovascular Research Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The study is published in the April 29 edition of Nature Communications.

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More Power to Mitochondria: Cells’ Energy Plant Also Plays Key Role in Stem Cell Development

April 27, 2015 – Researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center have discovered that mitochondria, the major energy source for most cells, also play an important role in stem cell development—a purpose notably distinct from the tiny organelle’s traditional job as the cell’s main source of the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) energy needed for routine cell metabolism.

Commentary: Hospice Services Can Better Promote Bereavement for Spousal Caregivers

May 26, 2015 – Nearly half of all people in the United States who are at the end of their lives receive hospice care, which provides compassionate care to patients with a focus on improving their quality of life. Although hospice does much to ease the physical and emotional burdens imposed on a caregiving spouse when their partner is terminally ill, this type of care could be further strengthened to attend to the psychological needs of family caregivers after their loved ones have died, Weill Cornell Medical College researchers write in a commentary published May 26 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Study Identifies Ebola Virus’ Achilles’ Heel

May 26, 2015 – An international team including scientists from Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) has identified the molecular “lock” that the deadly Ebola virus must pick to gain entry to cells. The findings, made in mice, suggest that drugs blocking entry to this lock could protect against Ebola infection. The study was published in today’s edition of the online journal mBio.

Parents Often Misperceive Their Obese Children as “About the Right Weight”

May 6, 2015 – Although rates of childhood obesity have risen over the last several decades, a vast majority of parents perceive their kids as “about the right weight,” according to new research led by NYU Langone Medical Center.

Patients with AIDS at Increased Risk of Developing Age-Related Macular Degeneration

May 4, 2015 – Patients with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) have a four-fold increase in their risk of developing intermediate-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to people of the same age who are not infected with HIV, according to results from the Longitudinal Study of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (LSOCA) presented today at the 2015 ARVO Annual Meeting in Denver, CO. The results of the study, led by the National Eye Institute-funded Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group, were also published online in the American Journal of Ophthalmology.

Durable Benefits Seen for Lung Volume Reduction Surgery for Emphysema

May 1, 2015 – Emphysema is a chronic, progressive, obstructive lung disease in which the small sacs of the lung (alveoli) are destroyed, leading to air pockets and severe breathing difficulties. In 2011, 4.7 million Americans reported being diagnosed with emphysema, and in 2013 more than 8200 patients died from emphysema.

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