News

This article was originally posted in the WCM Newsroom. 

A new preclinical study by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators found that certain bacteria in the gut may reduce susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection, improve the immune response and prevent blood clots that can occur in severe COVID-19 illness. The study, published Aug. 1 in Gut Microbes, suggests that dietary choices may also have the potential to enhance efforts to combat COVID-19 and its complications in humans.

The composition of the gut microbiome has previously been linked to varying outcomes for health conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, asthma, COPD and influenza. The investigators, led by senior author Dr. Melody Zeng, assistant professor of immunology in pediatrics in the Department of Pediatrics and a member of the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Research at Weill Cornell Medicine, believed that the same might be true for COVID-19.

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Marianne Nellis, M.D. M.S., as Director of Fellows’ Research in Pediatrics. In this role, together with the Vice-Chair of Education in Pediatrics, Dr. Nellis will oversee the quality of fellow research training and academic scholarly work within the department. She will collaborate with the Director of Clinical Research Mentoring and the Department’s Vice Chairs of Research to facilitate and oversee the development of fellows’ scholarly activity, the scholarship oversight committee and research-in-progress processes and mentor-mentee relationships. She will also lead the Fellows’ Research Curriculum, developing and maintaining a core content of educational activities to facilitate the fellows’ scholarly activity success.

The Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Pediatrics is pleased to announce the appointment of Abieyuwa Iyare, M.D. as Medical Director of the Well Newborn Nurseries as of July 5, 2022. In this new role, Dr. Iyare will work closely with nursing leadership to ensure high quality equitable care for newborns in the well nurseries at Alexandra Cohen (ACH) and Lower Manhattan (LMH) campuses. We would like to thank Jennifer DiPace, M.D. for her outstanding service and dedication as Medical Director for the newborn nurseries, where among many other accomplishments she oversaw a very successful move to ACH and the integration of the LMH nursery.

 Dr. Iyare was recruited from Montefiore Medical Center where she had been the director of the newborn nursery of the Weiler Campus to Weill Cornell in 2020 as Associate Director of the newborn nurseries at NYP/ACH and NYP/WC.  She has been very involved in quality initiatives, including updating the newborn toxicology protocols, use of dextrose gel in newborns with hypoglycemia and others, and teaching as the leader for the medical students’ experience in the nursery.

This article was originally posted in the WCM Newsroom. 

Antibodies that summon virus-engulfing white blood cells may play an important role in protecting infants from potentially serious congenital infection with human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), according to a study led by an investigator at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian.

The study, which appeared June 28 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, was the most comprehensive analysis of its kind to date in HCMV research. The researchers examined antibodies in the blood of 81 mothers infected with HCMV, comparing the properties of the antibodies in mothers who had transmitted versus hadn’t transmitted HCMV to their infants. A key finding was that women in the non-transmission group tended to show higher levels of the white blood cell-summoning mechanism, known as antibody-dependent cellular phagocytosis, against HCMV.