NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Historically, patients with severe ankle deformities were often considered poor candidates for total ankle replacement due to concerns about implant alignment, instability, and long-term durability.

Advances in implant technology, surgical techniques, and deformity correction are helping expand treatment options for patients with even the most complex foot and ankle conditions.

In this case, Dr. Raymond Walls and colleagues demonstrate how a comprehensive approach can help restore mobility and function in a patient with a severe deformity that may once have been considered untreatable with ankle replacement.

Learn more about this case ⤵️

Total Ankle Replacement With Severe Cavovarus Deformity - NYU Langone Health Physician Focus NYU Langone Orthopedics’ Dr. Raymond Walls corrected a 40° hindfoot–ankle varus and midfoot cavus in a single-stage surgery combining TAR, soft-tissue balancing, and osteotomies. Learn more.

Extensive mitral annular calcification can turn a routine valve replacement into one of the most dangerous procedures in cardiac surgery. Faced with a severe case involving near-circumferential calcification, NYU Langone Health surgeons chose a fully endoscopic, robotic-assisted approach to safely remove the calcium buildup and replace the patient’s mitral valve.

The procedure required complex repair of the heart’s atrioventricular groove and careful removal of heavily calcified tissue using the da Vinci robotic system. The patient was discharged home on postoperative day three.

Read more about this complex case ⤵️

Fully Endoscopic Robotic MV Replacement in the Presence of Severe MAC - NYU Langone Health Physician Focus An NYU Langone surgical team used robotic excision of near-circumferential mitral annular calcification to enable safe valve replacement in a high-risk degenerative case. Learn more.

Our new research may explain one of neuroscience's most enduring questions: how does the brain stay flexible enough to learn while remaining stable enough not to forget?

The answer, according to a study published in Nature, may lie in a small population of cells in the hippocampus. About 1 in 4 memory cells acts as a shared hub — handling both incoming and outgoing signals through separate firing patterns, keeping information organized without interference. The researchers describe it as a biological switchboard.

These cells also remain active during sleep, replaying waking experiences to consolidate memory — suggesting that the same architecture supports both learning and long-term storage.

The findings carry implications for three areas: understanding memory loss in Alzheimer's disease, advancing neuroscience methodology (the team recorded hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously across multiple brain regions for the first time), and informing the design of AI systems that can learn new tasks without losing prior knowledge.

"By showing how the mammalian brain can safeguard memories during learning, our research may offer a biological blueprint for designing next-generation AI technology that can update itself continuously without overwriting what it has already acquired." — György Buzsáki, MD, PhD, Biggs Professor of Neuroscience, NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Read more about this research ⤵️

Newfound ‘Switchboard’ Helps the Brain Form New Memories Without Forgetting Older Ones NYU Langone study uncovers flexible memory network that stops new memories from overwriting older ones. Findings may help improve AI tools. Learn more.

Even after multiple rounds of radiation and hormone therapy, recurrent prostate cancer can remain difficult to fully eliminate—especially when disease spreads to the seminal vesicles, an area that presents unique surgical and treatment challenges.

In this Urology Case of the Month, NYU Langone Health physicians combined focal cryoablation with robotic seminal vesiculectomy to treat recurrent disease at the prostate–seminal vesicle junction using a minimally invasive approach designed to target both visible and microscopic disease.

One year later, the patient showed no radiographic evidence of recurrence, while pathology findings also revealed disease extending beyond what imaging initially detected—highlighting the potential limitation of even advanced imaging technologies in recurrent prostate cancer.

Read the full case ⤵️

Combined Salvage Cryoablation and Robotic Seminal Vesiculectomy - NYU Langone Health Physician Focus NYU Langone’s Dr. James Wysock details the success of this approach in radiorecurrent prostate cancer with seminal vesicle involvement. Learn more.

Five years after surgery, a personalized cancer vaccine may still be protecting melanoma patients from recurrence.

New five-year data from the KEYNOTE-942 trial — led by Dr. Janice Mehnert of NYU Langone's Perlmutter Cancer Center — suggest that combining intismeran, an individualized mRNA neoantigen vaccine, with standard pembrolizumab therapy may offer durable protection in patients with resected high-risk melanoma.

At 60 months, recurrence-free survival was 68.8% in the combination arm versus 49.1% with pembrolizumab alone — a 49% reduction in recurrence or death risk. Distant metastasis-free survival risk was reduced by 59%.

Each vaccine was built from the patient's own tumor — encoded with up to 34 patient-specific neoantigens — designed to train T cells to recognize and attack returning cancer cells.

A phase 3 trial is fully enrolled. Results are anticipated soon.

Presented at | Published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. Read more ⤵️ https://bit.ly/4x2ndFw

📍 NYU Grossman School of Medicine | Perlmutter Cancer Center

Cancer Vaccine Sustains 49 Percent Melanoma Reduction After 5 Years NYU Langone Health study shows melanoma patients that vaccine therapy can demonstrably reduce their risk of having their cancer return. Learn more.

Dr. Marcus D. Goncalves, the newly appointed director of NYU Langone Health’s Holman Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism, shares his vision for advancing endocrinology care and research to meet evolving patient needs.

Under his leadership, the division is expanding programs in diabetes, metabolic bone disease, and pituitary disorders while strengthening basic-to-translational research—connecting scientific discovery more directly to patient care. Efforts are also focused on improving access, integrating data like continuous glucose monitoring into the EMR, and addressing disparities in care delivery.

Read more at Physician Focus ⤵️

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A three-minute smartphone game may help identify depression as reliably as standard clinical tests, according to a new study led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Published in PNAS, the research found that people previously diagnosed with major depressive disorder stopped taking pleasure in a simple foraging game about 50 percent sooner than healthy participants, a pattern that appeared to reflect a measurable disruption in how the brain sets reward expectations.

The game works by tracking what researchers call the "reference point," the threshold at which a person decides whether an activity is still worth pursuing. In participants with MDD, that threshold appeared to be significantly elevated and, notably, less flexible in response to changing conditions, a pattern that correlated with depression severity.

"Our behavioral game gives us clues to what is happening in the brains of patients with depression, which we hope will let us identify them as reliably as finding heart disease by taking someone's blood pressure," said co-senior study author Paul Glimcher, PhD, chair of the Department of Neuroscience and director of the Institute for Translational Neuroscience at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Researchers also found that patients with MDD appeared less able to adapt their reference points as circumstances changed, which they describe as a potential therapeutic target currently under investigation.

If validated in further clinical testing, the tool could offer a faster, lower-cost way to screen for and monitor depression remotely, without requiring repeated in-person visits.

🔗 Read more about this research ⤵️

3-Minute Video Game Identifies Patients Who Have Depression A new study from NYU Langone shows that a computer game quickly identified patients with depression. Learn more.

157 new doctors. One historic class.

On Monday, May 11th, the NYU Grossman School of Medicine Class of 2026 crossed the stage and into the next chapter of medicine.

This year’s ceremony carried special significance: the Class of 2026 is the first to include graduates from the 3+1 Personalized Pathway Curriculum, launched in 2023 as an expansion of our pioneering accelerated three-year MD pathway. Today, all NYU Grossman School of Medicine students graduate in three years or may choose an optional fourth year for research or dual-degree training.

The Class of 2026 carries forward not only exceptional training, but also the compassion, resilience, and sense of purpose that define great physicians.

Congratulations, doctors. 🎓