Highlights 2001-2002

The natural evolution of academic medicine has set Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons on a clear course toward greater collaboration and integration, as the interdisciplinary programs and achievements described here demonstrate. With our strategic plan in hand, we will be able to ensure that this shared vision for easing the burden of human disease can be thoroughly realized. We want our efforts today and in the future to measure up to the legacy that Columbia P&S has built. The following section lists only a few of the educational, research, clinical, and programmatic accomplishments of the past year.

The 10th White Coat Ceremony at P&S in August 2002 brought back the speaker from 1993’s inaugural ceremony, Dr. Benjamin Carson, director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, an organization dedicated to humanism in medicine, started the ceremony at P&S. It is now an annual tradition for incoming classes at more than 130 schools of medicine and osteopathy around the country plus schools abroad.

The impact of the late Virginia Apgar, a 1933 graduate of P&S and a pioneer in the fields of obstetrics, anesthesiology, and birth defects, was celebrated in a day-long symposium that marked the 50th anniversary of the renowned Apgar Score.

The opening of 390 Fort Washington Avenue marks the first new housing constructed on the Health Sciences campus since the 1970s. The 12-story residential building with 46 apartments houses postdoc research fellows.

To reduce the stigma of mental illness, P&S has a program with Fountain House, a New York mental health and social services organization, that uses interactions between medical students and individuals recovering from mental illness to foster understanding.

P&S students participated in the Reach Out and Read program to encourage literacy by having medical students as part of their orientation read books to children from local day-care centers at nearby parks. It helped to introduce the new students to the medical center neighborhood.

A chemical precursor of vitamin C called dehydroascorbic acid might someday be a new drug therapy to protect the brain from stroke damage. Researchers found that injections with DHA 15 minutes or three hours after stroke in mice significantly decreased the amount of damaged brain tissue and increased cerebral blood flow.

In studying trends in tuberculosis transmission in New York City, researchers examined strains of tuberculosis and determined that foreign-born persons developed tuberculosis mostly through activation of latent tuberculosis infections.

A new section in the Department of Surgery is devoted to colon and rectal surgery. It’s headed by R. Lawrence Whelan, a leading specialist in cancers of the colon and rectum and an innovator in minimal access surgery for colorectal cancers.

Radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer generally involves 35 to 40 radiation sessions, but researchers showed that the number of treatments could be reduced to about 6 to 12. The new schedules, now in clinical trials, are predicted to both improve cure rates and decrease the risk of side effects.

When researchers created a mouse model to examine the role of serotonin in the development of anxiety, they found that if the normal expression of a specific type of serotonin receptor is prevented early in development in a specific region of the brain, adult mice express a chronic anxiety state.

The Bartoli Brain Tumor Research Laboratory is examining a novel strategy to deliver cancer drugs. The technique produces convective forces that distribute a therapeutic agent throughout the tumor and surrounding interstitial space, enabling doctors to use anti-tumor compounds for brain tumors that would not be possible otherwise.

Significant advances have been made in understanding how genes in higher organisms are turned on and off. Work has unraveled how the addition of the chemical acetyl group acts as code by which individual proteins are recruited to the site of transcriptional initiation and thereby determine when synthesis of specific messenger RNAs begins and is terminated.

The new Center for Bioethics is the New York metropolitan area’s first unique multidisciplinary center that brings together experts from across the academic spectrum to examine and clarify emerging bioethical issues.

The Department of Surgery teamed with the Avon Foundation Breast Center of the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center to produce a free CD-ROM set to educate the public about breast disease. The CD set’s message is the importance of a proactive approach to breast health and early detection.

The Minority Medical Education Program gave 108 high-achieving pre-med students from around the country a look at medical school through biomedical and study skills courses, seminars, clinical experiences, and counseling to prepare them for application to medical school.

The Morris W. Stroud III Center for Study of Quality of Life has developed culture-fair quality of life assessment methodologies that are designed to minimize cultural bias. Application of these methods has improved measures of cognitive decline in minority groups.

Parents, teachers, and students learned about safe play at the opening of P.S. 152’s new playground in April 2002. The playground was a joint venture of the Columbia-based Injury Free Coalition for Kids, Children’s Hospital, the Manhattan borough president’s office, P.S. 152, and Universal Play Systems Inc.

Researchers identified a new molecule, protocadherin-PC, that is highly expressed in hormone- and therapeutic-resistant prostate cancer cell lines, providing hope for patients with advanced prostate cancer, which inevitably develops resistance to the hormonal treatment. The hormone-resistant form of prostate cancer often demonstrates cross-resistance to other therapeutic agents.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association’s Pediatric Clinic re-opened in April 2002 following extensive renovations. The refurbished waiting room includes computers, games, books, and a variety of activities for children as they wait to see their physicians and other members of the health-care team.

Research continues on the mechanisms of replication of retroviruses, including HIV. Researchers identified and cloned a novel host cell gene that blocks virus infection by specifically eliminating viral mRNAs from the cytoplasm. The gene may constitute a component of previously unappreciated antiviral machinery that restricts virus spread. It may offer a new opportunity for developing unique anti-viral therapies.

GeneWays, a collaboration of medical informatics, computer science, and the Columbia Genome Center, is an integrated system that combines several subtasks to capture and store information. It automatically extracts information from articles pertinent to molecular biology and analyzes interactions between molecular substances, drawing on multiple sources of information to infer a consensus view of molecular networks.

Researchers are learning why protease inhibitors cause severe cardiovascular side effects in some AIDS patients. A research team found protease inhibitor use leads to a buildup of apolipoprotein B, which, in turn, fosters the creation of the LDL cholesterol that clogs arteries with fat and causes heart disease.

Pediatricians are working to raise immunization rates in New York City children. With the Northern Manhattan Immunization Project they have implemented a web-based immunization registry to measure the ability to raise immunization rates of young children in an urban neighborhood.

The Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center has been selected as an Islet Cell Resource Center to bring islet transplantation research and therapy into wider practice. The Columbia Islet Cell Resource Center will accelerate efforts to isolate, purify, and characterize human islet cells.

A new study suggests that functional MRI can distinguish between seniors with normal memory loss and those who probably will develop Alzheimer's disease. Researchers use fMRI to detect dysfunctional brain regions.

Children who learn about their asthma at school through the Open Airways for Schools program can teach their parents important self-management skills that contribute to the quality of life and health status. The program, distributed nationwide by the American Lung Association, was developed at P&S.

Surgeons performed the nation’s first robotically assisted atrial septal defect repair and the nation’s first totally endoscopic cardiac artery bypass operation. The team also has performed robotically assisted lobectomies, thymectomies, and resection of other lung tumors with excellent results.

The Craft of Empathy is a unique approach to teach medical ethics and physician/ patient communication to medical students. The course is taught to second-year students as part of the clinical practice curriculum.

Some ethnic groups tend to score lower on tests of memory, reasoning, and other cognitive skills than whites even if participants had the same amount of schooling. When researchers measured not quantity of education, but quality of education or reading level, they were able to eliminate most racial differences found in the neuropsychological test assessments.

A new Celiac Disease Center provides patient care, research, and education to both patients with the rare disease and their caregivers. The center hosts a number of research programs investigating the genetics and epidemiology of celiac disease.

Researchers studying the mechanisms that produce brain injury in patients who have fat deposits removed from the inside of the carotid artery–by a surgical procedure called carotid endarterectomy–evaluated patients before and after the procedure and genotyped patients to determine if certain genes would predispose them to cognitive dysfunction. Preliminary results suggest that patients with the apoE4 allele have a significantlyhigher probability of sustaining injury than patients with other alleles.

Using a safe, novel immune suppressive, given for two weeks, researchers at the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center were able to arrest early stage Type 1 diabetes for at least one year. The drug, called hOKT3gamma1 (ala-ala), blocks immune cells that attack and destroy beta-cells. Patients taking the drug continued to produce their own insulin and needed less supplemental insulin to maintain their blood sugar than those who did not take the drug.

Researchers in the Center for Molecular Cardiology identified sections in ion channels, called “zippers,” that bind to other proteins that direct signals from the brain to the channels. The zippers are involved in heart failure and abnormal heart rhythms that cause sudden cardiac death.
test

After metal stents are placed inside the heart’s arteries to keep them open, stent restenosis can cause them to clog up and fail. Columbia cardiologists identified a drug that prevents restenosis and now effective drug-coated stents have been developed. American approval of the coated stents is anticipated by early 2003.

The first step in reducing medical errors is detecting them. Advanced informatics methods, such as natural language processing, data visualization, machine learning, and cognitive analysis are being applied to detect medical errors automatically based on the electronic medical record.

A study concluded that young college-aged women and postmenopausal women who take estrogen perform more consistently on memory tests compared with postmenopausal women not taking the hormone. The results may help neuroscientists localize areas in the brain where estrogen and aging impact function.

The Cerebrovascular Research Laboratory developed a primate model of embolic stroke, providing researchers with the most appropriate model yet for the design and testing of novel drugs to prevent brain damage.

Using a human lung cell model, researchers found a gene that has pronounced tumor suppressor function. The betaig-H3 gene is markedly decreased in many human cancer cell lines and in a high percentage of human lung cancer samples. Reintroduction of this gene into tumor cells resulted in a significant reduction in tumor growth.

Columbia Genome Center researchers constructed the world’s first carbohydrate chip, an array of 100 sugars attached to a chemically modified glass slide. The technology may be used someday to design a single chip, with thousands of carbohydrate antigens, that could help clinicians diagnose many common infectious diseases from a few microliters of blood.

Researchers elucidated the mechanism of ureter maturation for the first time and used mutated mice with impaired vitamin A signaling to study how urogenital birth defects might occur in humans.

The hormone leptin, produced by fat cells, plays a role in the control of body weight. Research showed that in individuals who have lost weight, administration of low doses of leptin normalizes the metabolic and hormone changes that make maintenance of reduced body weight difficult.

Within the long-term mental health system are many patients who are not able to express their symptoms through conventional means of inquiry. The “Feeling Tone Questionnaire” was developed as a valid and reliable tool for communication-impaired people with dementia.

An interdepartmental consortium is developing a nutrition curricular guide for training physicians and developing standards to inform patients about how food and nutrition affect disease. The consortium is comprised of National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute National Academic Award grant recipients.

A landmark study showed that implanted left ventricular assist devices can extend life and significantlyimprove the quality of life of terminally ill heart failure patients. A multicenter trial found that the use of an implanted heart pump more than doubled the likelihood that terminally ill heart failure patients would be alive at the end of one year.

Radiation oncologists developed a new imaging technique to detect and treat prostate cancer. The new imaging technology, coupled with improvements in treatment, has the potential to guide higher doses of radiation to high-risk areas in the prostate gland.

Radiological researchers reported the first estimates of radiation-related cancer risks for children receiving CT scans and suggested ways to simply but significantlyreduce cancer risks. The findings led the National Cancer Institute to send brochures nationwide with advice for doctors on how to reduce risks from pediatric CT scans.

The Paul Milstein Institute for Surgical Science reopened its renovated facilities in June 2002. The institute’s investigators collaborate to study diabetes and its complications, cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and immunity while seeking translational application of basic research to the bedside.

| Top |