Weill Cornell Medicine

Managing weight is more than just counting calories and exercising more, as Audrey and Don Friel have learned. Their physician Dr. Louis Aronne understands that, too. In Dr. Aronne’s office, the Friels have found a judgment-free zone. “Gain, lose, his attitude toward you as a patient is the same,” Don Friel said. Decades of studies say that this stubborn excess weight results from disruptions to the complex internal system. Scientists are uncovering a whole weight-regulation system consisting of hormones, fat tissue and an array of organs that act on the brain to stimulate or suppress hunger and adjust energy expenditure. In recent years, popular weight loss drugs have proven effective in managing weight and diabetes. But those medications are not without their drawbacks and don’t work for everyone. Since he began seeing Dr. Aronne in 2012, Don Friel is down 140 pounds from his peak weight. His body fights the medication, however, and to keep the weight off, he increased his dosage of semaglutide. “When I start getting hungry,” he says, “I get a little nervous, because” — “it’s a lifelong feeling,” Audrey Friel interjects. Still, Dr. Aronne predicts that one day these medications will be prescribed sooner and in smaller doses to prevent a patient from progressing to obesity. Read the full story in our summer issue of IMPACT: https://bit.ly/3W74oiM

A team led by Dr. Brad Jones has received $4.2 million to study how the immune system in some people infected with HIV can keep the virus under control, which could lead to novel therapeutic strategies for thwarting or eliminating HIV. The “Method for Extending Research in Time” (MERIT) grant from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) at The National Institutes of Health provides outstanding investigators with longer-term support for high-risk, high-reward experiments that could lead to significant breakthroughs. Full story: https://bit.ly/3zKHd6w

A new consortium co-led by our researchers has been awarded a $31 million grant to accelerate the development of faster, more effective treatment regimens for tuberculosis (TB). The National Institutes of Health grant brings together more than 30 multidisciplinary researchers from 20 institutions in 6 countries to identify the most promising new and existing treatment combinations for TB and help advance them toward clinical trials. A lack of new drug development and lengthy existing treatment regimens have contributed to the persistence of TB worldwide despite the availability of curative antimicrobial therapies. https://bit.ly/3Lib5JZ

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