Obstetrics & Gynecology

News and Events

Programs and providers of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine are often the focus of news stories and features appearing in major national media. We invite you to review some stories that typify the breakthrough accomplishments of our remarkable team and highlight the impact our care has had on patient’s lives.

Researchers Discover a Blood-Pressure Drug May Stimulate “Healthy” Brown Fat

brown fat

Losartan, a drug commonly prescribed for high blood pressure, boosts brown adipose tissue or “brown fat” activity and enhances its metabolism, according to a preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine, Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers. The findings suggest that repurposing losartan—an angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) with a well-known safety profile—may potentially offer a therapeutic approach to stimulate brown fat, which has been linked to improved cardiovascular health. Unlike normal white fat, which stores energy in the body, brown fat burns calories to generate heat. The study also reported, for the first time, that brown fat is associated with reduced prevalence of psychiatric diseases.

The study, published Oct. 14 in Nature, analyzed PET/CT scans that were performed as part of cancer surveillance for over 100,000 patients. The researchers focused on the scans that detected brown fat, which is located in six regions of the body, including the neck, armpit and around organs like the heart and kidneys.

Light-Activated Opioid Painkiller May Work Without Dangerous Side Effects

silhouette of a woman taking a pill

Opioid painkillers are some of the strongest analgesic medicines, but they are also the riskiest owing to a range of side effects, including addiction. An experimental opioid painkiller designed to be reversibly switched on and off with different light frequencies, keeping its action local and out of the brain, may eliminate the dangerous side effects of current opioids, according to a study led by Weill Cornell Medicine and University of Pennsylvania investigators. The findings herald a broad new approach for targeting medicines more precisely and effectively.

The investigators, whose results are published Oct. 15 in Cell, engineered a morphine-based compound called AM-3 that changes its shape in response to light in a certain frequency range. This conformational change alters AM-3’s degree of engagement with the mu-opioid receptor, the principal target of opioid painkiller drugs. The researchers showed that with this light-switching or “photopharmacology” approach they could activate AM-3’s painkilling effect only where needed, allowing substantial pain relief without side effects in multiple preclinical pain models, including cancer pain models.

Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research Awarded to Harvard Pediatric Hematologist-Oncologist

The Drukiers, honorees and leadership

Dr. Robbie Majzner, an esteemed physician-scientist whose research focuses on children with intractable cancers, has been awarded the 11th annual Gale and Ira Drukier Prize in Children’s Health Research by Weill Cornell Medicine.

The Drukier Prize recognizes an early-career pediatrician whose research contributions have the potential to significantly improve the health and well-being of children and adolescents. Dr. Majzner is an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Boston Children’s Hospital.

He is being recognized for his research efforts to design better CAR T-cells, understand the cancer targets those cells attack and test the resulting therapies, particularly in children with solid tumors and cancers that develop resistance to existing treatments.

Dr. Majzner’s lab studies how CAR T-cells—genetically engineered immune cells programmed to recognize and destroy cancer cells—receive and transmit signals once they encounter a cancer cell. This understanding of how the engineered immune cells function has allowed his lab to reimagine how they are designed and deployed.

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