Three Weill Cornell Medicine faculty members have received Young Physician-Scientist Awards from the American Society for Clinical Investigation. The 2022 award recipients are Drs. Bishoy M. Faltas, Gunisha Kaur and Hasina Outtz Reed.
One of the nation’s oldest nonprofit medical honor societies, the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) is comprised of more than 3,000 physician-scientists serving in the upper ranks of academic medicine and industry. The ASCI seeks to support the scientific efforts, mentorship needs and clinical aspirations of physician-scientists to advance medicine. The ASCI Council bestows Young Physician-Scientist Awards annually to physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable accomplishments in their research.
Dr. Bishoy Faltas is the Gellert Family-John P. Leonard, MD, Research Scholar and an assistant professor of medicine and cell and developmental biology. Dr. Faltas, who is also the director of bladder cancer research at the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, uses experimental models of bladder urothelial cancers to understand how cancer cells evolve to develop resistance to therapies. He is the principal investigator for a clinical trial at Weill Cornell evaluating the evolution of cancer cells in tumor tissue from patients treated with a targeted drug before bladder removal surgery. Most recently, Dr. Faltas led research that found that analyzing DNA shed by cancer cells in the blood, called circulating tumor DNA, predicts disease progression in patients with advanced bladder cancer months earlier than traditional imaging scans. The results suggest the method holds promise for real-time patient monitoring, allowing oncologists to adjust treatment plans sooner to address resistance to therapies.
“I’m grateful to those who nominated me and very pleased to receive the ASCI Council Young Physician-Scientist Award,” said Dr. Faltas, who is also a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. “It’s essential to go from the bench to bedside and back again, translating the best information from the lab to clinical trials and integrating these pieces of the puzzle to advance the care of patients with bladder cancer.”
Dr. Faltas has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications in leading journals, including Nature Genetics and Nature Communications. He has received several awards, including the ASCO Young Investigator Award and the AACR NextGen Star Award. Dr. Faltas has received funding for his research from multiple sources, including the United States Department of Defense, the NIH-funded Memorial Sloan Kettering Bladder Cancer SPORE program, the Weill Cornell Medicine Clinical & Translational Science Center, the Starr Cancer Consortium and the Polyethnic-1000 Consortium. He also serves as the translational science co-chair for several ongoing Phase II and Phase III clinical trials.
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The article above originally appeared on the Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom website on March 03, 2022.