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.

Using Data and AI to Create Better Health Care Systems

learning health systems

Academic medical centers could transform patient care by adopting principles from learning health systems principles, according to researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of California, San Diego. In this approach, information from electronic health records, clinical trials and day-to-day hospital operations is analyzed in real-time to uncover insights that continuously improve patient care.

The perspective, published June 17 in npj Health Systems, reasons that a smarter, more efficient and more equitable model of care can be created by harnessing existing data to support system-wide learning. Yet, adoption of this model remains limited.

Dr. Peter Steel

Dr. Peter Steel

Small Molecule Treatment Could Make Islet Transplantation Therapy More Effective

Immunofluorescent image of cells tagged with red, green and blue labels

A pretreatment step could help transplanted pancreatic islets survive longer in patients with type 1 diabetes, according to a new preclinical study from Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. One combination of small molecules extended the cells’ lives in female mice, and adding two molecules to the mixture boosted cell survival in male mice.

The findings, published on June 24 in Cell Stem Cell, could allow physicians to treat more patients with fewer cells.

In type 1 diabetes, autoimmune cells attack the pancreatic islets, destroying the insulin-producing beta cells and leaving patients dependent on insulin injections. The current FDA-approved transplant procedure replaces these cells with pancreatic islet cells from one or more deceased organ donors. It typically takes up to 48 hours to isolate islets from the donor for injection into a vein that carries them to the recipient’s liver. Once in the liver, the islet cells begin producing insulin, just as they would in a healthy pancreas.

Research at Risk: Stopping Metastatic Cancer

woman pointing at a computer screen while another woman looks on

Video of Research at Risk: Stopping metastatic cancer

Metastasis. It’s the word cancer patients dread most – and the scan with ominous black spots showing the disease has spread. For too many people, metastatic cancer is kept at bay only for a short time, with chemotherapy and radiation, before the disease returns or the harsh treatments fatally weaken the body.

For more than 20 years, Dr. Nancy Du, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and the Rasweiler Family Research Scholar in Cancer Research at Weill Cornell Medicine, has researched how metastatic cancer arises. With a $500,000 grant over three years from the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), she was poised to study how to prevent cancer from spreading to the bones of patients with estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer.

“The first line of treatment for this type of cancer is endocrine therapy; but soon after treatment, the cancer becomes resistant to treatment,” she said. “So, we are trying to determine what makes the cells stop responding. We have a clue, and we are testing our hypothesis to develop a better treatment plan for these patients.”

Du had recently begun the research when she received a stop-work order from the DoD in April.

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