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.

NIH Grant Awarded to Continue Non-Opioid Pain Medication Research

A close-up shot of a laboratory pipette releasing a single drop of clear liquid into a glass test tube, surrounded by other test tubes in a lab setting.

Weill Cornell Medicine has received more than $635,000 in first-year funding for a two-year grant worth up to $1.24 million from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, to study a new approach for delivering an experimental non-opioid pain medication, called BP4L-18:1:1, to relieve neuropathic pain. The grant could be extended beyond its second year if the research achieves prescribed milestones.

People with neuropathic pain, which occurs when the nervous system itself is damaged, have few effective options to treat their pain, and current treatments are often minimally effective and are frequently associated with a poor side effect profile. The current grant aims to improve the efficacy of BP4L-18:1:1 by providing tissue-specific drug targeting. The new delivery system, if scientifically validated, could allow us to improve the drug’s efficacy and reduce the drug dose,” said principal investigator Dr. Peter A. Goldstein, a professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and an anesthesiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, who for the past decade has been working with members of his laboratory, notably Dr. Gareth R. Tibbs, as well as through industry start-up Akelos, Inc. to develop the experimental therapy.

Weill Cornell Launches Physician-Scientist Program to Support Early to Mid-Career Faculty

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Video of Physician Scientist Incubator | WCM

Physician-scientists possess the ability to transform patient-inspired clinical needs into the healthcare of tomorrow. “These are the people who turn questions at the bedside into the breakthroughs that change medicine,” said Dr. Geraldine B. McGinty, executive vice dean of Weill Cornell Medicine. Yet, their ability to combine their skills in clinical medicine and scientific discovery to bring things from the bedside to the bench and back with a sustained degree of focus and intentionality remains an ongoing challenge.

To help solve this challenge and support outstanding physician-scientist faculty who have successfully launched independent funded research programs, Weill Cornell Medicine has launched the Weill Cornell Physician-Scientist Incubator Initiative.

New Strategy May Target Common Cancer Driver with Minimal Side Effects

ribbon structure of protein and molecule binding rendered in glass

Researchers have found a surprisingly common vulnerability in a broad variety of cancers and have begun designing drug compounds to exploit it, in a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine. The findings suggest the possibility of a potent, low-side-effect treatment that could benefit many patients with colorectal, breast and other cancer types.

The new strategy targets a signaling pathway called the WNT pathway, whose hyperactivity is common in cancers and boosts malignancy through multiple mechanisms. Targeting WNT signaling without harming normal cells has been notoriously difficult. However, in the study, which appears Nov. 2 in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers found that many cancer cells are deficient in one of two redundant WNT-supporting enzymes. They showed that selectively targeting the remaining one reduces WNT signaling in such cells with no apparent effect on healthy cells. The researchers demonstrated the strategy successfully in early preclinical experiments with a selective enzyme inhibitor they developed.

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