Richard D. Carvajal, MD, has been named director of the Experimental Therapeutics/Phase I program and melanoma service in medical oncology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, effective November 1, 2014. Dr. Carvajal, a medical oncologist, has extensive clinical expertise in melanomas and leadership experience in early-stage clinical trials for patients with advanced cancers, as well as in the development of novel therapies for rare cancers. He joins NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he was director of Developmental Therapeutics and the Elizabeth and Felix Rohatyn Chair for Junior Faculty.

Acute rejection is a primary cause of death in heart transplant recipients. A promising new treatment, daclizumab, under investigation at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, has been shown to decrease the frequency of rejection without increasing the incidence of infection in heart transplant recipients for a three-month period following transplantation.

It is well known that women have a "biological clock" associated with declining fertility, increasing risk for fetal birth defects, and altered hormone levels. Now an increasing body of scientific evidence points to the existence of a similar male biological clock, according to a retrospective review article by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center researchers published in the Nov. 15 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Conditions associated with the male phenomenon include declining fertility, lowered testosterone levels, diabetes, heart disease, depression, erectile dysfunction (ED) and an increased risk of fetal birth defects.

For many Americans living with a heart transplant, invasive heart-muscle biopsies that check for organ rejection are a fact of life. Now, a simple blood test that analyzes a patient's genes has been evaluated by leading transplant centers and shows that it can accurately detect the absence of heart transplant rejection.

Good nutrition is vitally important to both cancer patients and cancer survivors in promoting healing and preventing recurrence. Yet this can be a challenge, especially for current patients, for whom eating and drinking is often difficult due to treatment side effects that alter appetite and sense of taste.

A new craniofacial surgery program has opened at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Made possible by a generous gift to the Hospital from NewYork-Presbyterian trustee David H. Komansky and his wife Phyllis Komansky, the program will offer comprehensive care, including corrective surgery, for deformities of the skull, face and jaw.

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is one of the country's top workplaces for information technology (IT) professionals, according to Computerworld magazine's annual survey. It ranks among the top three organizations in New York City, and is the City's only hospital named. The June 30 special issue also lists NewYork-Presbyterian as one of the top two IT workplaces for diversity, and first in the category for the Mid-Atlantic region.

Promising results from a team of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center physician-scientists show that gene therapy is both safe and effective at slowing the progression of Batten disease, or Late Infantile Neuronal Ceroid Lipofuscinosis (LINCL), a rare, genetic, degenerative neurological disorder that usually becomes fatal in children by the age of 8 to 12.