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Weill Cornell Medicine Launches $1.5 Billion We’re Changing Medicine Campaign with More Than $750 Million in Gifts

Video of We're Changing Medicine - Campaign Launch Event

NEW YORK (June 17, 2021) — Building on a legacy of groundbreaking advances in medicine and science, Weill Cornell Medicine today launched an ambitious $1.5 billion campaign—with more than $750 million already raised—that will harness emerging biomedical innovations to bring exemplary care to patients and create enduring change in medicine.

The We’re Changing Medicine campaign is the...

COVID-19 Virus Linked to Pancreatic Cell Identity Shift

SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the global COVID-19 pandemic, can infect human pancreatic cells and alter their physiology, according to research from Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators. Though the results come from analyses of autopsy samples and cultured cells and don't prove a direct causal relationship, they dovetail with clinical reports of glucose control problems in COVID-19 patients, suggesting a new dimension of disease development for a virus that has...

Graduate Student Successes Recognized at Convocation

The Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences honored the students in the Class of 2021 for their academic achievements during a virtual convocation ceremony on May 19. Students and their families and friends watched a livestream of the event, as graduate school faculty announced the recipients of special awards and prizes.

“While our convocation celebration looks different than our traditional ceremony, taking time to acknowledge the dedication, perseverance and scientific...

New Pre-Clinical Model Could Hold the Key to Better HIV Treatments

A team led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Children’s National Hospital has developed a unique pre-clinical model that enables the study of long-term HIV infection, and the testing of new therapies aimed at curing the disease.

Ordinary mice cannot be infected with HIV, so previous HIV mouse models have used mice that carry human stem cells or CD4 T cells, a type of immune cell that can be infected with HIV. But these models tend to have limited utility because the human...

Dr. Giovanni Manfredi Awarded NIH Outstanding Investigator Award

Dr. Giovanni Manfredi, the Finbar and Marianne Kenny Professor in Clinical and Research Neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, has received an Outstanding Investigator Award (R35) from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) to study the role of mitochondrial dysfunction in brain disease.

The highly competitive award provides long-term support and flexibility for an investigator to...

Study Illuminates Role of Gut Microbes in the Response to TB Treatment

Gut bacteria play an important role in the body’s response to treatment for tuberculosis (TB), according to researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Memorial Sloan Kettering. Because current treatments for TB involve long courses of antibiotics, which are known to disrupt the balance of microbes in the gut, a better understanding of these interactions may help in predicting outcomes to therapy and suggest ways to improve it.

In their study, published Feb. 18 in Nature Communications,...

Study Brings Neuroscience a Step Closer to a High-Resolution Mammalian Brain Atlas

A team led by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine has made a map identifying all the different RNA molecules that are derived from each gene in the brains of mice. It is the first map that depicts this important layer of biological diversity, called isoform variation, by cell type and across brain regions for the whole genome, and it contributes to neuroscientists’ ambitious goal of an ultra-detailed atlas of the brain.

Isoform variation is a process that extends the versatility of...

Justice for All: Weill Cornell Medicine Redoubles its Efforts Toward Racial Equity in Medicine—for the Benefit of Clinicians, Patients and Society

By Heather Salerno
Portraits by John Abbott

Like so many others across America and beyond, second-year medical student Chimsom Orakwue was outraged by the harrowing footage that captured the last moments of George Floyd’s life, as a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest late last spring. Something about the protests in the wake of Floyd’s death felt different from the demonstrations against police brutality that Orakwue had marched...

Study Reveals How a Longevity Gene Protects Brain Stem Cells From Stress

A gene linked to unusually long lifespans in humans protects brain stem cells from the harmful effects of stress, according to a new study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

Studies of humans who live longer than 100 years have shown that many share an unusual version of a gene called Forkhead box protein O3 (FOXO3). That discovery led Dr. Jihye Paik, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, and her colleagues to investigate how this...

Study Identifies ‘Achilles heel’ of Bacteria Linked to Crohn’s Disease

The discovery of an “Achilles heel” in a type of gut bacteria that causes intestinal inflammation in patients with Crohn’s disease may lead to more targeted therapies for the difficult to treat disease, according to Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators.

In a study published Feb. 3 in Cell Host and Microbe, the investigators showed that patients with Crohn’s disease have an overabundance of a type of gut bacteria called adherent-invasive Escherichia coli (AIEC...