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Dr. Anjali Rajadhyaksha, professor of neuroscience in pediatrics and Associate Dean of Program Development and Dr. Francis Lee, interim Dean at Weill Cornell Medicine have been awarded an R01 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse their study entitled, “Circuit and Synaptic Mechanisms of Endocannabinoid-Opioid Crosstalk.”

The current opioid crisis has contributed to drug overdoses becoming the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50 years, with a constant increase in overdose deaths among adolescents. Opioids (morphine, oxycodone, fentanyl) remain the main line of medications for pain management, underscoring the urgent need for new non-opioid treatment options or adjuvant therapies that eliminate the addictive properties, but not the analgesic aspects of these medications.

Adolescence is an important developmental period between childhood and adulthood during which the brain is highly plastic and influenced by a variety of environmental factors.  Exposure to substances of abuse during adolescence can impact the developing brain and lead to abnormalities in brain function including neurocognitive performance. 

The Department of Pediatrics is pleased to announce the promotion of Kimberley Chien, M.D. to Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, effective December 1, 2022.

Dr. Chien is an Associate Attending Pediatrician at New York-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital and New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.  She is board-certified in pediatrics and pediatric gastroenterology.  She received a B.S. in Neuroscience at Tufts University and earned her medical degree at SUNY-Downstate Medical College of Brooklyn.  She completed her pediatric internship and residency training at NYU School of Medicine and attended New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center to complete fellowship training in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition. 

This article was originally posted on the WCM Newsroom

In 2021, a group of scientists led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian reported that the Moderna mRNA vaccine and a protein-based vaccine candidate containing an adjuvant, a substance that enhances immune responses, elicited durable neutralizing antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 during infancy in pre-clinical research.

Now a follow-up study by the same group, published Dec. 1 in Science Translational Medicine, has found that the 2-dose vaccines still provide protection against lung disease in rhesus macaques one year after they had been vaccinated as infants.

Eric J. Mallack, M.D., Director of the Leukodystrophy Center and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine is the Co-Principal Investigator of a new phase 2/3 clinical trial, sponsored by Minoryx Therapeutics. The “NEXUS” study will assess the efficacy and safety of leriglitazone in pediatric patients with early-stage cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy (cALD).

 Alongside Co-PI, Patricia Musolino, MD, PhD from Massachusetts General Hospital, the team aims to confirm whether researchers can halt or stabilize early cerebral ALD, a progressive inflammatory neurodegenerative disease of childhood, with leriglitazone - a novel, orally bioavailable and selective PPAR gamma agonist.   If proven effective, this will be the first non-transplant-related therapy (e.g. stem cell transplant and gene therapy) that can halt this childhood neurodegenerative disorder.  And if delivered early enough, it may stop the disease in the pre-symptomatic period of disease, thus preserving full neurological function in these patients.  

 The imaging outcomes in the study were developed from Dr. Mallack’s quantitative MRI research in lesion volumetry (PMID: 34503945), and Dr. Musolino’s work in MR Perfusion (PMID: 22961546).