Dear Friends & Members of the Englander Institute,
We are thrilled to announce that renowned cell therapy expert Dr. George Coukos has joined Weill Cornell Medicine as a professor of immunology in medicine, and will also serve as Associate Director for Precision Cell Immunotherapy at the Englander for Precision Medicine, exploring the systems biology underpinning tumor growth and developing highly tailored cellular immunotherapies, especially T cell therapies!
A leader in his field, Dr. Coukos has a lauded history of translating scientific discovery into innovative new therapies. His discovery of the role of the immune response in ovarian cancer outcomes helped him develop innovative therapies that leverage the immune system to treat this deadly form of cancer. He has also made key discoveries regarding how tumors can suppress the activity of tumor-killing immune cells, called T-cells.
We hope you enjoy this engaging Question and Answer interview with Dr. Coukos.
Be sure to check out highlights from our annual Town Hall in December and learn how we're transforming medicine through personalized approaches that leverage advanced technologies for disease prediction, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention!
Thank you again for your continued hard work and dedication to our mission, and best of luck for a happy, healthy & productive New Year!
Sincerely,
Olivier Elemento, Ph.D.
News Coverage & Awards
Congratulations to our Chief Research Officer Dr. Bishoy Faltas on earning a 2025 AACR Grant for Innovative Bladder Cancer Research. This grant will advance his ongoing investigation of CDADC1, a (d)CTP/CTP deaminase, as a therapeutic target and support development of novel strategies for bladder cancer!
"The Stack Is Less About Any Single Tool And More About The Connective Tissue," is a new blog post in OncoDaily on January 7th by Director Olivier Elemento, Ph.D. highlighting the cutting edge technology used by EIPM investigators. Dr. Elemento also published the OncoDaily blog post "China’s Medical AI Pipeline Dwarfs the US," on January 8th. 
Drs. Scott T. Tagawa and Pinkal Desai participated in a GU Oncology Now expert panel on January 6th that sought to answer the question: "Can Baseline Clonal Hematopoisis Predict Toxicity From Targeted Radionuclide Therapy?"
Events
Thank you to everyone who has helped plan the 2026 Summer Internship Program that we administer jointly with the Meyer Cancer Center! Our volunteers, faculty & trainees will work closely with high school and college students to create an exciting and meaningful program. 
We hope you'll join us for an EIPM AI Clinic and learn about applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to data analysis (Claude, GPT5, Gemini 2.5 Pro), coding challenges, manuscript writing, and exploring how AI tools can securely optimize research and workflows. All skill levels are welcome at our bi-weekly Clinics on Wednesdays at 2 PM. Check our X/Twitter feedfor the latest information.
Publications
"Whole genome sequencing approach to assess homologous recombination deficiency in a pan-cancer cohort," was published in Communications Medicine on January 12th by Drs. Juan Miguel Mosquera, Majd Al Assaad, and Andrea Sboner from Pathology and Laboratory Medicine department and the EIPM; and EIPM Drs. Olivier Elemento, Daniela Guevara, David C. Wilkes, Eleni Andreopoulou, Eloise Chapman-Davis, Scott T. Tagawa, Allyson J. Ocean, Manish A. Shah, Cora N. Sternberg, Kevin Holcomb, and David M. Nanus, with EIPM colleagues Marvel Tranquille, Abigail King, John Otilano, Alissa Semaan, Michael Sigouros, Jyothi Manohar, and Hui-Hsuan Kuo. The publication was highlighted in the Weill Cornell Medicine newsroom and generated attention from GenomeWeb and The ASCO Post. 
"Genotype-to-phenotype mapping of somatic clonal mosaicism via single-cell co-capture of DNA mutations and mRNA transcripts," was published in Cancer Discovery on December 31st by Dr. Dan Landau, and promoted in the Weill Cornell Medicine Newsroom January 15th article, "Scientists Identify Pre-Cancerous States in Seemingly Normal Aging Tissues." 
"CAMP: a modular metagenomics analysis system for integrated multistep data exploration. applied CAMP to a set of 10 metagenomics samples, demonstrating how a modular analysis system with built-in data visualization facilitates rich seamless communication between outputs from different analytical purposes." Was published in Genomics and Bioinformatics by Dr. Iman Hajirasouliha and colleagues, January 16th. 
In the proof-of-concept study, "A Multimodal Approach for Deep-Learning Classification of Vocal Fold Pathologies in Stroboscopy," published in The Laryngoscope by Director Olivier Elemento, Ph.D. and WCM colleagues on January 5th, the authors successfully developed a multimodal dataset and classifier for VF pathology, demonstrating the potential of combining stroboscopic frames, voice and text data. The multimodal classifier achieved higher accuracy than the image-only model and audio-only models. Future models should validate these findings on larger datasets.
"Ratio-Driven Lipoprotein Mapping Refines Genetic Pathways of Cardiometabolic Risk," is a Research Square preprint from January 7th by Dr. Karsten Suhre.
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