A hotly debated topic among clinicians and information professionals is the usefulness of medical websites in providing patient information. Dr. Martin Weiser, MD, the Vice Chair for Education and Faculty Development and the Stuart HQ Quan Chair of Colorectal Surgery at MSK argues that “for patients who feel a loss of autonomy, medical websites help them gain a sense of control at a scary and sometimes helpless time” in his NYT Room for Debate piece. He balances that with the point that many of these websites are not without issues, but at the end of the day it is his job as the clinician to inform and educate the patient about the treatment of their disease.

Dr. Sarat Chandarlapaty, MD, PhD, discusses the role of the PI3K pathway in metastatic breast cancer. A less common mutation than AKT, he states that developing a drug that targets these mutations may help difficult to treat patients.

A new device, the CytoSorb, is a blood filtering system intended to decrease the risk of inflammation, one of the main causes of life-threatening diseases like sepsis. Intensive care therapies currently work as supportive, in order to get to patient back to where they can recover on their own. However, Dr. Neil Halpern, MD, Chief of Critical Care Medicine at MSK points out that ” “what we need are new medicines and technologies that target the root cause of these diseases.”

A wall of 80,000 falling paperclips with a poem written by a young man who lost his battle to cancer designed by Silver Springs, Maryland artist Francie Hester welcomes patients and visitors at the new Josie Robertson Surgery Center. “Wordfall” was created as a memorial to Brendan Ogg from Silver Springs who died of a brain tumor in 2010 at the age of 20. Brendan used poetry as a means to cope with his illness and his poem L’Chaim was featured in “Wordfall”.