Oct 8, 2015 | Inside, Research

Leticia Tordesillas, PhD
Leticia Tordesillas, PhD, and Elizabeth Heller, PhD, are the recipients of the 2015 Robin Chemers Neustein Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, which was created to encourage and support female research scientists at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Dr. Tordesillas works in the laboratory of Cecilia Berin, PhD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics. Her research is focused on how to establish immune tolerance to foods for the treatment of food allergy. In particular, she is studying how regulatory T cells induced by epicutaneous immunotherapy are generated and suppress anaphylaxis. (more…)
Sep 28, 2015 | Research, Your Health
In a screen of more than 100,000 potential drugs, only one, harmine, drove human insulin-producing beta cells to multiply, according to a study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, published in Nature Medicine.
Diabetes results from too few insulin-producing “beta cells” in the pancreas secreting too little insulin, the hormone required to keep blood sugar levels in the normal range. In a groundbreaking Mount Sinai study, researchers found that harmine drove the sustained division and multiplication of adult human beta cells in culture, a feat that had eluded the field for years. In addition, harmine treatment tripled the number of beta cells and led to better control of blood sugar in three groups of mice engineered to mimic human diabetes. (more…)
Sep 25, 2015 | Research, Your Health
Andrew Stewart, MD, the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine and Director of Mount Sinai’s Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism Institute led a team of scientists who discovered a novel mechanism that regulates the replication of insulin-producing beta cells in the pancreas. Their findings provided novel working models describing the control of cell cycle progression in the human beta cell. These discoveries offer new insights into possible therapeutic approaches to stimulate the regeneration of pancreatic beta cells in patients with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. (more…)
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Inside, Research
Advances in cancer immunotherapy, a promising new area in cancer treatment that harnesses the body’s immune system or natural defenses to destroy cancer cells, are being led by Nina Bhardwaj, MD, PhD, Director of Immunotherapy, and Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology), at The Tisch Cancer Institute. (more…)
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Inside, Research
A protein that promotes abnormal growth in melanoma cells has been identified for the first time by a team of researchers led by Emily Bernstein, PhD, Associate Professor of Oncological Sciences, and Dermatology, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The novel discovery that the H2A.Z.2 protein is highly expressed in melanoma, appears to turn on the cell cycle, and makes melanoma cells grow faster, could also lead to therapeutic strategies that serve to inhibit cell proliferation. The results of Dr. Bernstein’s study were published in the July 2, 2015, issue of Molecular Cell. (more…)
Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Inside, Research
Surviving spouses of patients who received hospice care for three or more days more frequently reported reduced depressive symptoms after the patient’s death compared to spouses of patients who did not receive hospice, according to a study by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers. The findings were published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine. (more…)