News

The Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation at NYP/Columbia is making noteworthy progress in the treatment of hepatocellular cancer (HCC) and cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), cancer of the bile duct, and is the national leader in this field.

At NYP/Columbia, general thoracic surgeon Frank D’Ovidio, MD, PhD, is collaborating with gastroentereologists David Markowitz, MD and Daniela Jodorkovsky, MD, to help patients with complex esophago-gastro-intestinal motility disorders. A wide range of services is now offered by a panel of experts at the Center for Motility and Neurogastroenterology, one of a few such programs in the nation.

Recently Columbia oncologists diagnosed a toddler with acute myelogenous leukemia, and thanks to The Sohn Foundation for Precision Medicine, the entire family underwent genetic testing. Three of his siblings were found to have a gene linked to thyroid cancer. Their father was the carrier. Dr. Kuo found a suspicious thyroid nodule in his neck and with ultrasound-guided fine needle aspiration biopsy diagnosed medullary thyroid cancer, a rare and aggressive form of this disease. She operated the following week. “With our early intervention,” she says, “there is a very good chance that the father has been completely cured and will remain cancer-free.”

Damien J. LaPar, MD, MSc, has joined the Section of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery in the Division of Cardiac, Thoracic and Vascular Surgery at the NYP/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital at Columbia University Medical Center and Weill-Cornell Medical Center.