Tech4Health: The New Health Technology and Engineering Institute at NYU Langone Health
 

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Health Technology and Engineering Institute (Tech4Health) at NYU Langone Health. Tech4Health will connect engineers and physical scientists with clinicians and life scientists across the NYU landscape, developing tomorrow’s cutting-edge technologies to solve current challenges in biomedicine. Daniel Sodickson, MD, PhD, professor in the departments of radiology and neuroscience & physiology, and Shy Shoham, PhD, professor in the departments of ophthalmology and neuroscience & physiology, are co-leading this effort.
 
Dr. Shoham, a biomedical engineer and an expert in neural engineering and computational neuroscience, recently joined the NYU Langone faculty from the Technion – Israel’s premier Institute of Technology. He is well acquainted with NYU Langone, being a visiting faculty member in the Neuroscience Institute since 2015. 
 
Capitalizing on Dr. Sodickson’s innovations in imaging and Dr. Shoham’s expertise in optical and ultrasound modulation of brain activity, initial Tech4Health research and development projects will focus on diverse and data-rich monitoring and modulation of body functions, as well as advancing computational analyses of continuous data streams. The institute will include an engineering team to support challenging development projects. Tech4Health is located on the 10th floor of 433 First Avenue, next to the Bioengineering Institute of the Tandon School of Engineering.

 

Thales Papagiannakopoulos and colleagues have discovered that a frequently observed inactivating mutation in the gene KEAP1 fuels cell growth in certain lung tumors (Nat Med, Oct 2017). When inactivated, KEAP1 releases its brakes on antioxidant production, leading to increased resistance to stress and enhanced tumor cell growth. The team found that rapid growth of these cells was dependent on elevated levels of glutamine, a molecule that cancer cells rely on for energy. It may be possible to therapeutically target the lung cancer cells’ dependence on glutamine with a drug that cuts off its supply, the researchers say.

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Dayu Lin, Bernardo Rudy, and colleagues have revealed that the brains of female mice regulate aggression differently than do the brains of male mice (Nat Neurosci., Sept 2017). The researchers studied a region of the brain called the ventromedial hypothalamus. Their earlier work implicated this brain area in aggression in male mice, and they found the same here for females — in contrast to other studies. However, these behaviors were organized differently in the two sexes. In the males, neurons throughout this brain region fired during both mating and fighting, but in females two different groups of neurons within the ventromedial hypothalamus fired, depending on whether the mice were mating or fighting. Understanding how the brain controls aggression may help develop drugs that suppress it in humans, the researchers say. 

 

Jeffrey Weber led a study sponsored by Bristol-Myers Squibb with international collaborators that found one immune system-targeting cancer drug, nivolumab, is significantly more effective in fighting advanced melanoma than another, ipilimumab (New Engl J Med, Sept 2017). The two drugs were compared in a randomized, double-blind trial comprised of 906 patients. Both are so-called checkpoint inhibitors, which lift the brakes that prevent the immune system from attacking the cancer. The study showed that nivolumab is much less toxic and provides a more favorable relapse-free survival rate to patients than ipilimumab. Melanoma causes just 1% of all skin cancers, but the majority of skin cancer deaths.

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