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 Treat Breast Cancer with Bacteria

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A scientist at Weill Cornell Medicine is working with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on new, complementary research efforts engineering therapeutic Salmonella to target critical gaps in treatment for drug-resistant triple-negative breast cancers. The team has received a five-year, $13.1 million grant, the first of its kind for bacteria cancer therapies awarded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, to support research to design nontoxic bacteria strains that can deliver three treatment options.

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Dr. Sarah Cheal

Dr. Samie Jaffrey Receives NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award

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Dr. Samie Jaffrey, the Greenberg-Starr Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, has received a five-year, $5.5 million NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award for the comprehensive study of how messenger RNAs are regulated in cells by small molecules called metabolites.

The NIH Director’s Transformative Research Awards, part of the Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research, fund bold and innovative projects that have the potential to transform one or more fields of biomedical research. Only six such awards were issued in 2026. Dr. Jaffrey and his team are known both for their development of tools for studying RNA molecules and for their use of such tools to make important discoveries. Their recent work suggests that metabolites—relatively simple molecules involved in cell metabolic processes—represent a previously hidden layer of mRNA regulation in higher organisms. With the new NIH award, the scientists will comprehensively map and characterize metabolite-RNA interactions. Their aim is to open up this realm of biology for basic research and the development of novel disease treatments.

Dr. Olivier Elemento Wins NIH Director’s Pioneer Award

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Dr. Olivier Elemento, the director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded an NIH Director's Pioneer Award to build an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to accelerate cancer research, starting with lung cancer.

Part of the Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports scientists with outstanding records of creativity to develop pioneering approaches to major biomedical challenges. Only seven such awards were issued this year. The five-year, nearly $6 million grant will fund an AI-human discovery engine that uses large language model agents, such as those used in AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, to generate hypotheses from human cell and tissue data. The system will then test the hypotheses using robotics testing platforms that can run hundreds to thousands of experiments in parallel on human cells or organoids, miniature three-dimensional tumors grown from patients’ own cells.

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