News

Dr. Sallie Permar, an eminent physician-scientist who focuses on the treatment and prevention of neonatal viral infections, has been appointed chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and pediatrician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital, effective Dec. 1.

Recruited as the Nancy C. Paduano Professor of Pediatrics, Dr. Permar will helm the pediatrics enterprise at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Under her leadership, the department will continue to enhance its mission to provide exceptional patient care and medical education in pediatrics, and conduct cutting-edge research on diseases that affect newborns and children.

“Dr. Permar is a distinguished physician-scientist, highly skilled educator and proven leader,” said Dr. Augustine M.K. Choi, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medicine. “Under her direction we will advance our mission of excellence in pediatrics, enhancing research and innovation, training future pediatricians and pediatric specialists, and providing the best care and the brightest future to children and their families. We are thrilled that Dr. Permar is joining us as chair of the Department of Pediatrics.”

The Weill Cornell Physicians Organization has selected seven outstanding physicians for the Healthcare Leadership Fellows Program (2020-2021) to foster their development as physician leaders, including Cori Green, MD, MSc, associate professor of clinical pediatrics and Director of Behavioral Health Education and Integration in Pediatrics in the  Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Pediatrics.  

Dr. Green's fellowship will focus on the Behavioral and Mental Health (B/MH) program from an educational, clinical, and research standpoint in the Department of Pediatrics.  The Department's initiatives will reach primary care faculty and practices and, eventually, subspecialty and inpatient care as well.  For year one starting in July 2020, the goal is to begin to change attitudes and culture for all faculty members, to implement a 3-year longitudinal curriculum with the new interns, and to implement B/MH screening in the primary care settings.  Dr. Green plans to be concurrently participating in the Fellowship Program during year one, and her project will be to study these implementation efforts. 

An underlying problem with the production of important cellular building blocks called sphingolipids may explain why children with certain genetic risk factors develop asthma, according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian and Columbia University Irving Medical Center investigators.

In a previous investigation, teams led by Dr. Stefan Worgall, chief of the Division of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy and Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, and Dr. Tilla Worgall, associate professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, showed that reduced production of sphingolipids causes hypersensitive airways in mice. Now, in a study published Jan. 13 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, they confirm that asthmatic children who have genetic variations associated with an increased risk for the disease also produce less sphingolipids. The findings may help scientists develop new therapies for asthma that target this underlying problem rather than later symptoms of the disease like inflamed airways.

Microscopy shows that the main cell types that take up tumor-derived exosomes in brain tissue are endothelial cells (red) and microglia (green), which are often found in close vicinity to blood vessels. All images courtesy of Gonçalo Rodrigues and Dr. David Lyden.

A protein that breast, lung and other cancers use to promote their spread—or metastasis—to the brain, has been identified by a team led by Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian investigators. The protein, CEMIP, will now be a focus of efforts to predict, prevent and treat brain metastases, which are a frequent cause of cancer deaths.

In their study, published Nov. 4 in Nature Cell Biology, the scientists found that CEMIP prompts blood vessel and resident immune cells in the brain to produce inflammatory molecules, which in turn support the survival and progression of cancer cells to form brain tumors. In lab-dish and animal-model experiments, removing CEMIP greatly impeded this brain metastasis process. In tests on human patients’ breast and lung tumors, the researchers linked high CEMIP levels to a high risk of metastasis to the brain.