The promotions of Jennifer Blaha, MBA; Clare Lee, MBA; Lisa Maqueira; and Alen Voskanian, MD, MBA, represent an intentional investment in leadership capacity to meet Cedars-Sinai’s core mission of delivering the highest-quality care to patients in Los Angeles and beyond.

“These four leaders exemplify the operational excellence and strategic acumen required to deliver on our care vision,” said Peter L. Slavin, MD, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System. “Collectively, these promotions expand the portfolio of responsibilities held by leaders who have shown, time and again, that operational excellence and exceptional patient care are complementary priorities.”

Blaha, senior vice president of Surgical Services, joined Cedars-Sinai 17 years ago from GE Healthcare, where she served as a senior consultant, and has since risen through senior operational roles across the institution before being named vice president of Operations in 2018.

In her new role, she will oversee the service lines of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Orthopaedics, Surgery, Transplant and Urology, along with Peri-Procedural Services, including Anesthesia and OR Operations.

Blaha has built a strong record of improving clinical quality, patient satisfaction and operational efficiency across the surgical service lines she now leads. She was one of 22 healthcare leaders selected nationally for the Carol Emmott Fellowship, a competitive program advancing women in healthcare leadership.

Lee, senior vice president of Medical Services, brings 34 years of healthcare experience, including 21 years at the executive level, to her new role. She joined Cedars-Sinai in 2018 as vice president of Operations. Prior to Cedars-Sinai, Lee was chief operating officer at Dignity Health Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento and vice president of Operations at Houston Methodist.

In her new role, she will oversee the service lines of Medicine, OB/GYN, Pediatrics and Psychiatry, along with Imaging, Lab and Pathology, and Emergency Services. Over her career, she has transformed clinical operations within the service lines under her purview, cultivating strong leaders and driving significant improvements across clinical and operational areas.

Maqueira, senior vice president of Finance and chief revenue cycle officer, joined Cedars-Sinai in 2011 as director of Professional Billing and Revenue Cycle Services, leading the transformation of professional billing operations. She was promoted to vice president of Revenue Cycle and Managed Care Operations in 2016, taking on expanded responsibility for managed care operations and contracting, professional compliance, government incentives, and centralized scheduling for Cedars-Sinai Medical Network.

Maqueira was named vice president of Finance and chief revenue cycle officer in 2022, leading the organization’s integrated revenue cycle strategy across hospitals and physician networks. With 33 years of revenue cycle experience, she has consistently delivered stronger collections, improved charge capture and greater operational efficiency. In her new role, she is accountable for setting and executing a strategic vision to advance exceptional patient and provider experience while strengthening financial performance.

Voskanian, senior vice president and chief operating officer of Ambulatory Clinics, joined Cedars-Sinai in 2018 from VITAS Healthcare, where he was regional medical director. He served as medical director of Cedars-Sinai Medical Group and later as vice president and chief operating officer of Cedars-Sinai Medical Network.

A practicing physician who continues to care for patients, Voskanian has helped lead ambulatory strategy and the growth and integration of specialty practices, contributing to substantial growth in weekly patient volumes during his tenure as chief operating officer. Working closely with clinical and administrative leaders, he has also advanced a dyad leadership model that strengthens collaboration, improves operational performance and supports physicians and staff in delivering high-quality care.

Read more from Cedars-Sinai Stories and Insights: New Cedars-Sinai CEO Shares Vision for Growth and Priorities

“Through my interests in research and patient care, I saw a need for a tool that could streamline a critical gatekeeper process,” said Ella Tetrault, who has worked at Cedars-Sinai for two years and is earning a master of science in health systems at Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University.

Her tool is designed to save staff time and help patients receive faster access to care by flagging missing details, drafting justification letters, and creating a checklist with action items for staff before they submit the request to insurers.

Tetrault’s tool also is a perfect example of how Cedars-Sinai is empowering employees to use AI to solve common healthcare problems and improve patient care, said Mouneer Odeh, MA, chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Cedars-Sinai.

“We see artificial intelligence as an opportunity to rethink how we deliver care and run our operations,” Odeh said. “Our employees are our first step in identifying how new technologies can become part of our workflows, and their willingness to adopt these technologies drives our innovation.”

During Cedars-Sinai’s “Prompt-A-Thons,” employees compete to develop AI tools to solve operational, clinical and administrative challenges. Nearly 80 groups submitted proposals at the summer competition. Topics ranged from personalizing patient education to assessing patients’ risk for pharmaceutical side effects.

Ten employee teams were then selected to present their AI solutions at a final showcase in front of a panel of judges. Second- and third-place presentations aimed to streamline the Emergency Department trauma documentation auditing process and provide faster, more integrated reporting for medical center data.

During her winning presentation, Tetrault estimated that her pre-authorization tool could save 450 hours per year per authorization staff member.

“According to the American Medical Association, prior authorizations take up roughly 13 hours a week of any given employee’s time,” Tetrault said. “Unfortunately, many of these authorizations are denied due to missing information or submissions not matching the payer’s policy. Most appealed denials get overturned.”

Chain Insights: Turning Prompt-A-Thon Experience Into Action

The Cedars-Sinai Supply Chain Department won a 2025 Prompt-A-Thon for designing an app to help streamline nursing paperwork and give nurses more time for direct patient care. The app, Chain Insights, monitors supplies, tracks back orders, and flags approved substitutes for items that might become unavailable.

Chain Insights, built by a Cedars-Sinai team from Supply Chain Operational Excellence, Enterprise Information Services and Nursing, was first tested as a pilot on an inpatient floor at Cedars-Sinai. Early data shows that it reduced nurses’ supply-ordering time by 1 1/2 minutes per call.

“This time savings adds up to roughly seven hours each day once fully rolled out for the nursing team,” said Nausheen Ahmed, executive director of Supply Chain Operational Excellence. “With approximately 300 calls to our supply chain team each day, this modest but important efficiency means nurses can reclaim time to focus on their most important role, patient care.”

For supply chain staff, knowing how much inventory is available and where it is housed is critical, especially when a nurse calls with a need for supplies. Each call requires a detailed discussion including when the supplies must be in hand and possible substitutions if an item is on back order.

Chain Insights replaces the phone call with an app that precisely locates inventory. The app also identifies unnecessary items to help clear space, a “quieter win” but one that compounds over time.

Regina Chung, MSN, RN, CMSRN, a nurse at Cedars-Sinai, uses Chain Insights every shift.

“Chain Insights has made it easy to quickly order the supplies I need while on the go, even while I am walking in the halls between patients,” Chung said. “I always receive the correct product and quantity, and when items are out of stock, it tells me immediately, so I am not aimlessly waiting. These efficiencies allow me to focus on providing exceptional care to our patients.”

Leaders from Supply Chain Operational Excellence designed data models, decision frameworks and inventory intelligence that tell the tool how to think about supply risk and priorities.

Cedars-Sinai employees from Enterprise Information Services wrote the code and built the infrastructure, turning that back-end logic into a working application. Nursing colleagues provided continuous frontline input, including real-world testing of the tool to ensure it solved the right problems.

“This effort stands as an example of what happens when teams build something together to solve a real problem,” Odeh said. “It's also a signal of what's possible when the people closest to the work are empowered to build the solution, and there's more to come. There is nothing more motivating than seeing knowledge be translated into solutions.”

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

In this new senior leadership position, Thadhani will oversee the academic and clinical enterprises at Cedars-Sinai, further unifying the organization's care delivery, research and education missions. He will lead a broad team of leaders, including department chairs, institute directors, executive vice deans, vice deans and chief medical officers.

Thadhani succeeds Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, who served as dean of the Medical Faculty and executive vice president of Medicine and Health Sciences for 28 years. Melmed will transition to the role of dean emeritus of the Medical Faculty and executive adviser to Cedars-Sinai President and CEO Peter L. Slavin, MD.

“Dr. Thadhani is the ideal leader to succeed Dr. Melmed,” Slavin said. “His extensive background in organizational leadership, commitment to clinical medicine and academic excellence and robust scientific record position him to advance every dimension of our enterprise.”

Thadhani most recently served as executive vice president of Clinical Affairs and chief medical officer for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System. In his new role, he will retain oversight of clinical quality and safety, medical affairs, and medical standards of care for the medical center and health system, while assuming additional responsibility for all academic and education programs, including Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University and the Burns and Allen Research Institute.

Thadhani began his career at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He served as vice dean for Research and Education at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from 2017 to 2019 before returning to Harvard as professor of medicine and serving as chief academic officer and dean for Faculty Affairs at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School.

In 2022, he was named executive vice president for health affairs at Emory University as well as vice chair of the Emory Healthcare Board of Directors and executive director of Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which includes Emory’s schools of medicine, public health and nursing.

Thadhani is the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific manuscripts published in leading academic journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

A leading expert in nephrology and preeclampsia, one of the leading causes of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality, Thadhani played a central role with Cedars-Sinai collaborators in developing the first Food and Drug Administration-approved test to predict the condition.

His research contributions have earned recognition at the highest levels of science and medicine. Earlier this year, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), following his election last year to the National Academy of Medicine.

“I am deeply honored to step into this role at such a pivotal moment for Cedars-Sinai,” Thadhani said. “I am grateful to Dr. Melmed for the extraordinary foundation he has built, and I look forward to working closely with our talented leaders and faculty to forge the next chapter of our academic and clinical mission.”

Read more from the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom: Physician-Scientist Ravi Thadhani, MD, MPH, Named AAAS Fellow

The allied health school prepares students—particularly those from Southern California’s underserved communities and Cedars-Sinai employees—for healthcare careers.

Jessica Chung, 29, is one of five students graduating from the allied health program, established with a $30 million gift from the Chuck Lorre Family Foundation. She is completing the Clinical Laboratory Scientist Program, which prepares students with the innovative skills, clinical practices and procedural techniques needed for a successful career in a hospital laboratory.

“The training experience has been challenging but highly rewarding,” said Chung, a Pasadena resident. “Working as a clinical laboratory technician inspired me to grow professionally and make a greater difference in patient care.”

Chung, who holds a bachelor of science degree in molecular, cell and developmental biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, praised the instruction she received throughout the program.

“My Cedars-Sinai instructors generously shared their knowledge and gave me a deeper appreciation for how every part of the laboratory works together to support patients,” Chung said. “I look forward to developing my skills further and mentoring new specialists entering the field.”

The graduating class also includes students receiving a doctorate in biomedical and translational sciences, a master of science in health systems, and a master of science in magnetic resonance in medicine. The graduate programs combine scientific and translational medicine curricula with dedicated mentorship from scientists and clinicians.

Peter L. Slavin, MD, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System, will serve as a commencement speaker.

“This year’s ceremony marks a significant milestone in the continued growth of our health sciences university,” Slavin said. “With this graduating class and the ones that follow, our university will expand its contribution to biomedical science, clinical care, practitioner advancement and a rich variety of healthcare careers.”

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University was established in 2024 to prepare generations of academic scientists, physician leaders and allied health professionals for the future of healthcare and biomedical science.

Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, executive vice president of Academic Affairs and dean of the Medical Faculty at Cedars-Sinai, said graduates will use their training to shape healthcare delivery and scientific advances.

Melmed played a foundational role in establishing the Cedars-Sinai Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and the health sciences university.

“Our graduates immersed themselves in basic and translational research and helped spur innovation, discovery and creative scholarship at Cedars-Sinai and beyond,” Melmed said. “We are delighted to watch the many ways they bring their training to myriad disciplines.”  

Melmed will be honored during the ceremony for 46 years of extraordinary service to Cedars-Sinai. He transitions to the role of dean emeritus of the Medical Faculty and executive advisor to the president and CEO at the end of 2026.

Melmed and other commencement speakers said the university’s students gain a better understanding of human disease and how best to treat individuals and populations, enhance disease prevention and elevate the overall health of communities.

“Our university brings an energy and enthusiasm unique to Cedars-Sinai,” said Jeffrey A. Golden, MD, executive vice dean of Research and Education who also helped found the health sciences university.  “This energy is best exemplified by the graduates we get to recognize at commencement—innovators in healthcare delivery, pioneers of medical technologies and forward-thinking leaders who are now equipped to solve the many mysteries of medicine.”

The first graduates from the Chuck Lorre Allied Health School include clinical laboratory scientists Melissa Amy Casillas and Jessica Chung, and pharmacy technicians Mehdi Allahbakhsh, Fariba Fazeli and Jayson Flores.

The class of 2026 of master of science in health systems graduates includes Brianna Garcia; Claudia Carrillo; Alexa Schroer; Elisa M. Ditman; Fiorella Agredas; Ayako Ikenouchi; Elizabeth LeeAnn Jackson; Jigna Dhyani, MSHS; Katherine Eckert; LaShon Heidelberg; Michael Fine; Michelle E. Riley, PA-C; Rainier Francisco Pizarro; Ranjalika Aashna Devi; Rongsen Li; Samaneh Samadi; Julio Silvestre, MD; Jenna Mattinson; Sheree Wynn; Ta'Nia J. Harris, BSBA, CIIP; Thomas J. Hoffmann; and Harmon Arthur Clarke Jr.

Doctor of philosophy in biomedical and translational sciences graduates include Alicia Gamboa, Sehrish Javed, Arati Naveen, Michael Edison P. Ramos, Fardad Serry, Vaishnavi Devarakonda and Jianhang Zhou.

Master of science in magnetic resonance in medicine graduates include Dante Rigo de Righi, Angel Liu, Yimeng He, Sophia Katherine Mostowy, Chen Wang and Yufeng Wang.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

The deployment of OpenEvidence reflects Cedars-Sinai’s broader strategy to use AI tools and technologies to safely improve care precision and produce better patient outcomes.

Through this partnership, Cedars-Sinai physicians, nurses, pharmacists and therapists can ask clinical questions and retrieve medical literature that is relevant to an individual patient’s health profile. The AI tool can help answer clinical questions by linking the latest scientific findings with a patient’s prior procedures, comorbidities, medications, allergies and other health data recorded over time.

Cedars-Sinai also plans to incorporate its own care pathways, protocols and best practices into the OpenEvidence enterprise platform. This will enable Cedars-Sinai clinicians to view current medical literature alongside Cedars-Sinai-specific guidance for delivering safe, high-quality care.

“Integrating OpenEvidence into our electronic health records allows clinicians to look at the latest medical evidence in the context of a patient’s medical history and individual health data, giving physicians and other healthcare professionals a more complete and actionable understanding at the moment of care,” said Shaun Miller, MD, MBA, chief health informatics officer at Cedars-Sinai.

Patient information from the electronic health record will be used only to support care decisions for individual patients and will not be stored by OpenEvidence or used for any other purpose.

“Medicine is not practiced in the abstract. It is practiced on individual patients with unique histories and complexities,” said Daniel Nadler, CEO and founder of OpenEvidence. “This partnership with Cedars-Sinai establishes a new standard: clinical AI that doesn’t just retrieve information but interprets the world’s medical knowledge in the context of the specific patient. We are building a tool that aligns cutting-edge evidence with real-world care to drive better outcomes.”

OpenEvidence is one example of Cedars-Sinai’s broader AI strategy, which aims to streamline and improve patient care, reduce administrative burden on clinicians and educate the workforce about the evolving uses of these technologies.

For example, Cedars-Sinai is using AI to help nurses and other care team members document patient care in real time, analyze and produce reports from echocardiograms, and predict which of two available chemotherapy options for pancreatic cancer would be more effective for an individual patient.

Miller said it is critical to deploy fair, appropriate, effective and safe tools that provide tangible benefits to the roughly 1 million patients treated at Cedars-Sinai each year.

“We want to create a coherent, secure AI ecosystem rather than isolated pilots, and we approach all AI integration carefully,” Miller said.  

Before any AI system goes live at Cedars-Sinai, it goes through a specially designated committee that reviews tools prior to deployment and audits their impact. The committee includes data scientists, clinical experts, administrative leaders and other specialists specific to the particular area under review.

This oversight process is designed to ensure new tools meet Cedars-Sinai’s guidelines for human oversight and verification of AI-generated output, data privacy, and protection of patient health information and intellectual property.

“We see artificial intelligence as an opportunity to rethink how we deliver care and run our operations,” said Mouneer Odeh, MA, chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Cedars-Sinai. “As technologies like OpenEvidence become part of how we work, our strategy centers on improving workflows while supporting the people who do the work.”

AI, Odeh said, is advancing at an incredible pace.

“We are constantly evaluating new technologies with cautious optimism, so we can safely deliver better experiences for our patients and care teams while providing exceptional care to the communities we serve,” he said.  

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

A New Algorithm Could Improve Location of Lifesaving Devices

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University investigators and colleagues created an algorithm designed to use data on sudden cardiac arrests to determine the best public locations for lifesaving devices called automated external defibrillators. Their findings were published in IJC Heart & Vasculature.

Known as AEDs, the portable devices deliver an electrical shock, with an aim to restart the heart when it stops beating due to sudden cardiac arrest. Sudden cardiac arrest is common and usually fatal when it happens somewhere other than a hospital.

“Research shows that the sooner a bystander can locate and use an AED, the higher the likelihood that the person experiencing sudden cardiac arrest survives,” said Sumeet Chugh, MD, vice dean and chief AI Health Research Officer at Cedars-Sinai, and senior author of the paper.

The investigators reviewed data on incidents of sudden cardiac arrest in Ventura County, California, and Multnomah County, Oregon, that took place between 2012 and 2023. The algorithm they created identified clusters of three or more incidents that occurred within a 100-meter radius of each other, and proposed AED locations within 200 meters of where these clusters occurred. 

Future studies will be needed to determine whether the algorithm is an improvement over current AED location strategies, the investigators said.

“These community-based studies are a huge team effort that involves ongoing collaborations with colleagues in emergency medical services and the fire department,” said Chugh, who is also director of the Center for Cardiac Arrest Prevention in the Smidt Heart Institute. “We hope researchers use this algorithm to study how the placement of AEDs reduces deaths from sudden cardiac arrest.”

Cedars-Sinai investigator Elizabeth Heckard, MS, is first author of the paper. Additional Cedars-Sinai authors include Harpriya Chugh, BE, MSHS, and Kyndaron Reinier, PhD, MPH.

Other authors include Katy Hadduck, Bryan McNally, Ali Sovari, Jonathan Jui, and Angelo Salvucci.

Cedars-Sinai Studies Pharmacist-Led Transitions-of-Care in Older Adults

Older hospitalized patients who struggled with taking their medications correctly were 10% less likely to need to return to the hospital if they had a pharmacist’s help at discharge, according to a new multisite clinical trial based at Cedars-Sinai. But the findings, published in JAMA Network Open, found the extra help didn’t significantly reduce unplanned hospital visits for the rest of those 55 and older.

The trial included more than 6,000 hospitalized older adults on high-risk or multiple medications, randomly assigning some to receive special pharmacist-led review of their medications and follow-up based on any issues identified. Investigators tracked patients’ hospital readmissions and emergency department visits for 30 days after discharge.

“The study suggests that pharmacist-led care could be beneficial for certain patients,” said Joshua Pevnick, MD, MSHS, co-director of the Cedars-Sinai Division of Clinical Informatics, associate professor of Medicine and corresponding author of the study. “With this new data, we encourage hospital care teams to ensure they support patients with low medication adherence and understanding, as they likely would benefit most from the efforts of our strong pharmacy transitions-of-care team.”

Other Cedars-Sinai authors include An T. Nguyen, OTD, OTR/L, BCG; Kallie Amer, PharmD, BCPS; Carl T. Berdahl, MD, MS; Galen Cook Wiens, MS; Hiroshi Gotanda, MD, PhD; James Guan, PharmD, BCPS; Andrew J. Henreid, MS, MPH; Donna W. Leang, PharmD, MSHS, BCPS; Yervant Malkhasian, PharmD; Teryl K. Nuckols, MD, MSHS; Audrienne S. Ortiz, PharmD, BCPS; Emily Phung, PharmD, BCPS; Nabeel Qureshi, PhD, MPH; Rita Shane, PharmD; and Shirley Wu, PharmD, BCPS.

Other authors include Korey Kennelty, PharmD, MS, PhD, BCGP, John Fanikos, RPh, MBA; Julie Fiskio; Michelle S. Keller, PhD, MPH; Eunji M. Ko, PharmD; Lina Matta, PharmD, MPH, BCPS; Dylan Moriarty, PharmD, BCACP, BCGP; Logan Murry, PharmD, PhD; Annie Muske, PharmD; Onyeche Oche, RPh, PhD, MBA-HCA; and Jeffrey L. Schnipper, MD, MPH, MHM on behalf of the PHARM-DC Group.

Funding support for this study was provided by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, grant number R01AG058911 (to Joshua Pevnick). Additional funding support was provided by the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute under grant number UL1TR001881 and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Research and Education Foundation.

Scientists Target Key Protein Duo Driving Colon, Liver Cancer

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University investigators have identified a drug-like compound that prevents two proteins from working together to promote the growth of colorectal and liver cancer. Findings from the preclinical study were published in Cell Death & Disease.

Investigators focused on the proteins GIT1 and MAT2B, which are found at unusually high levels in these cancers. The proteins partner to form a “scaffolding” that drives cancer growth. The team discovered that a compound called C3 targets GIT1 and disrupts this structure. The disruption slows cancer cell growth and triggers cancer cell death, which helps prevent the cancer from spreading.

Colorectal cancer is among the most diagnosed cancers, and its spread to the liver is a common, serious and life-threatening complication.

“We were pleased to find a promising drug candidate that attacks colon and liver cancers simultaneously,” said Shelly Lu, MD, the Women’s Guild Chair in Gastroenterology, director of the Karsh Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Cedars-Sinai, and the study’s corresponding author. “And because GIT1 is overactive in many cancers, this discovery could have broad and powerful applications in cancer treatment.”

The next step is to refine the compound to improve its effectiveness.

In related research, Lu, a member of Cedars-Sinai Cancer, and Cedars-Sinai investigators recently uncovered another way colorectal cancer spreads. They found that cancer cells release two forms of an enzyme called MATα2 that work together to weaken the liver’s natural defenses, which helps cancer spread to the liver and survive there. The findings suggest that blocking this process could offer another promising future treatment approach.

Additional Cedars-Sinai authors include Hui Peng, Jyoti Chhimwal, Wei Fan, Jiaohong Wang, Lucia Barbier-Torres, Sonal Sinha, Avradip Chatterjee, Yi Zhang, Maria Lauda Tomasi and Ramachandran Murali.

Additional authors include Jose M. Mato.

Funding: The work was supported by NIH grant P01CA233452 (SC Lu, ML Tomasi), Plan Nacional of I+D SAF2017-88041-R (JM Mato).

Disclosures: SCL and RM have filed a patent for small molecule inhibitors of GIT1 (Title: COMPOUNDS AND METHODS FOR TREATING CANCERS; Application No. 63/422,672; Filed: Nov. 4, 2022).  

Cedars-Sinai Creates First Working Model of Specialized Gut Cells

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University investigators have for the first time created human intestinal organoids that include functional Paneth cells, a specialized cell type that is found in the inner lining of the intestine. This achievement, published in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology, facilitates study of the cells’ role in health and disease and opens new opportunities for understanding gastrointestinal disorders.

Organoids are tiny groups of cells, grown in the lab, that mimic some of the structure and functions of actual organs. The organoids are generated from induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be turned into many different cell types.

“The model of Paneth cells that we developed can facilitate research into how genetic variations, microbes and the intestines’ immune system influence them,” said Robert Barrett, PhD, associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and corresponding author of the study. “This knowledge is important because changes in Paneth cells are associated with chronic gastrointestinal disorders such as Crohn’s disease that involve abnormal reactions of the immune system.”

No team of investigators had previously been able to grow intestinal organoids that included functional Paneth cells. By changing the environment in which the organoids were grown, investigators this time were successful. In addition, because organoids derived from induced pluripotent stem cells carry the donor’s genetic material, the new model eventually could lead to personalized treatments for gut illnesses such as inflammatory bowel disease, according to the investigators.

Additional Cedars-Sinai authors include Shachi Patel, Monica Silveira Wagner, Olivia Bay, Christian E. Wong Valencia, Eliska Zgarbova, Cynthia I. Rodriguez, Daniel N. Leal, Michifumi Yamashita, Suzanne Devkota, Kathrin S. Michelsen and Stephan R. Targan.

Funding: Supported by the National Institutes of Health R01 DK123511 (SRT) and the F. Widjaja Inflammatory Bowel Disease Institute. MSW and CWV were supported by the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM EDUC4-12751). The study sponsors played no role in the study design collection, analysis, or interpretation of data.

Disclosures: Shachi Patel, Monica Silveira Wagner, Stephan R. Targan and Robert J. Barrett are named as inventors on a U.S. Application No. 19/458,165, each titled “Methodologies to Generate Human Paneth Cells and Enterochromaffin Cells and Determine Their Responses.” The remaining authors disclose no conflicts.

Study Identifies Genetic Drivers of Resistant Hypertension

Cedars-Sinai investigators have identified distinct genetic variants associated with resistant hypertension, a type of high blood pressure that remains uncontrolled despite medication. Their findings, published in the journal Hypertension, suggest potential targets for diagnosing and treating this serious condition.

More than 10% of people with high blood pressure have resistant hypertension, which means they face higher risk of cardiovascular illness and death than people with nonresistant high blood pressure do.

Investigators reviewed genetic data on 92,740 people with consistently high blood pressure in Finland and the United Kingdom. The study identified variants in genes involved in hormonal regulation and blood vessel function that are highly associated with resistant hypertension. The findings highlight overproduction of the hormone aldosterone as a likely cause of difficult-to-control blood pressure.

“Understanding the genetic and bodily pathways that predispose individuals to resistant hypertension may help us identify these patients,” said co-corresponding author Joseph Ebinger, MD, associate professor of Cardiology and director of the Coronary Intensive Care Unit and Clinical Analytics in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai. “This knowledge can help us develop strategies to lower their blood pressure and reduce their risk for heart attacks and other potentially fatal cardiovascular events.”

Additional Cedars-Sinai authors include Sandy Y. Joung, MSHS, MBA, and Susan Cheng, MD, MPH.

Other authors include Anni Kauko, PhD; Felix Vaura, MD; Paul Hage, BS; Johan Sundström, MD; FinnGen; and Teemu Niiranen, MD.

Funding: This work was funded by the Academy of Finland (321351), the Finnish Foundation for Cardiovascular Research, the Paavo Nurmi Foundation, the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, the Mary and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Hospital District of Southwest Finland, and the National Institutes of Health grants R01-HL134168, R01-HL131532, R01-HL143227, R01-HL142983, K23-HL153888, K23-HL136853, and R01-HL153382.

New Method Rapidly Analyzes Cell Proteins and Metabolites

Researchers at Cedars-Sinai have developed a fast, new technique for analyzing cells, described in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The approach, called single-injection multi-omics analysis by direct infusion (SMAD), can detect more than 1,300 proteins and more than 9,000 molecular features from a single sample in less than five minutes. The method could help researchers study health, disease and drug responses more quickly and at lower cost, while simplifying analyses that usually require more complex workflows.

To show how the method can be used, the researchers applied it in several case studies. These included tracking how immune cells shift into different inflammatory states and screening how human cells respond to drug treatments.

“By making molecular analysis faster, this approach could one day accelerate drug discovery, enable more powerful machine learning models, and help move rapid, large-scale biological testing closer to clinical use,” said Jesse Meyer, PhD, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai.

Additional Cedars-Sinai authors include Yuming Jiang, Amanda Momenzadeh and Jesús Muñoz-Estrada.

Other authors include Ivan Salladay-Perez, Utkarsh Tripathi and Anthony J. Covarrubias.

Funding: NIH (R35GM142502, R35GM156893, and R21AG074234).

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

The organization, one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals, has awarded fellowships since 1874.

The distinguished lifetime honor recognizes Thadhani’s pioneering work in the field of nephrology and in the study of preeclampsia, a leading cause of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. He played a leading role in developing the first Food and Drug Administration-approved test to predict preeclampsia.

“Dr. Thadhani is an internationally respected leader in clinical and translational research,” said Peter L. Slavin, MD, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System. “His visionary work strengthens Cedars-Sinai and extends beyond our healthcare system to the broader medical and research community.”

Thadhani is among nearly 500 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been elected a 2025 Fellow for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements throughout their careers.

Thadhani joins the ranks of several Cedars-Sinai faculty who have been honored, with the most recent being Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, executive vice president of Medicine and Health Sciences and dean of the Medical Faculty at Cedars-Sinai, who was elected in 2025.

“I feel immensely grateful to have a career dedicated to serving patients and science,” Thadhani said. “My work and life have been enriched by the countless mentors, colleagues, trainees and mentees who have collaborated alongside me—people and experiences for which I am deeply thankful.”

Thadhani began his career at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He served as vice dean for Research and Education at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from 2017 to 2019, then returned to Harvard as professor of Medicine and chief academic officer, and dean for Faculty Affairs at Mass General Brigham.

In 2022, Thadhani was named executive vice president for Health Affairs at Emory University, vice chair of the Emory Healthcare Board of Directors and executive director of Emory’s Woodruff Health Sciences Center, which includes Emory’s schools of medicine, public health and nursing.

He returned to Cedars-Sinai in October 2025, rejoining the team involved in this research: Anders Berg, MD, PhD, vice chair of Clinical Pathology; S. Ananth Karumanchi, MD, professor of Medicine and director of the Renovascular Research Center; and Sarah J. Kilpatrick, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Shortly after his return to Cedars-Sinai, Thadhani was elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

He has been inducted into several additional honor societies, including the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the American Epidemiological Society, and the American Clinical and Climatological Association.

Thadhani is the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific manuscripts that have been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association and other top-tier academic journals.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

“This new academic alliance between these premier Los Angeles institutions will advance scientific and academic achievements for the broader Los Angeles community and beyond,” said Peter L. Slavin, MD, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Cedars-Sinai Health System.

The partnership features joint translational discovery grants, as well as co-hosted symposia, shared training opportunities, and joint student and faculty appointments.

“Our partnership with Cedars-Sinai provides an important new pathway to clinical impact,” said Caltech Provost David A. Tirrell, PhD, the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and the Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair.

Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, executive vice president of Medicine and Health Sciences and dean of the Medical Faculty at Cedars-Sinai, said the goal of the partnership is to reshape patient care and biological understanding, together.

“Recognizing the unique strengths of each institution, we feel confident this partnership will benefit the greater field of science,” Melmed said.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University combines a robust basic, translational and clinical sciences enterprise with a large and diverse patient population, along with an expanding biospecimen repository. Caltech brings exceptional expertise in engineering, computational modeling, chemistry, and quantitative biosciences, along with advanced research in molecular, cellular and systems biology.

“Better healthcare for all requires bold innovation. This partnership brings together Cedars-Sinai’s clinical leadership and Caltech’s scientific excellence to deliver it,” said  Viviana Gradinaru, PhD, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Neuroscience and Biological Engineering, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and director and Allen V. C. Davis and Lenabelle Davis Leadership Chair of the Merkin Institute for Translational Research.

The official partnership has been years in the making, with investigators like Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, director of the Center for Neural Science and Medicine and professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology and Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai, holding faculty appointments at both institutions. Those joint faculty positions opened the door for thoughtful discussions on how the two entities could increase their collaborations.

Ophir Klein, MD, PhD, executive director of Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s, executive vice dean of Children’s Health and the David and Meredith Kaplan Distinguished Chair in Children’s Health, recognized the potential synergy when he joined Cedars-Sinai in 2022.  Klein then initiated co-hosted programs to foster greater collaboration.

The first joint symposium, in 2024, concentrated on developmental and stem cell biology. The second, in 2025, focused on computational and experimental neuroscience. Both events sparked enthusiasm and spurred the impetus for further collaborations.

“The opportunity to engage regularly through these events will lead to a more profound partnership between the two institutions and deeper connections among faculty and trainees,” Klein said. “There’s a unique energy in the room when two complementary forces have a shared desire for the best in science and accelerated application.”

Another element of the strengthened partnership involves a pilot grant program to catalyze research that unites clinical insight, engineering and fundamental biological discovery.

The joint grant program will award up to four recipients with support for a one-year project and an opportunity for a second year. Funds will be split between investigators at Cedars-Sinai and Caltech.

“We are eager to stimulate interdisciplinary collaborations that support research and integrate biomedical, clinical, computational and engineering approaches,” said Jeffrey A. Golden, MD, executive vice dean of Research and Education and director of the Burns and Allen Research Institute at Cedars-Sinai. “Leveraging the scientific and technological ecosystems of both institutions will help advance the broader research landscape and bring advances in healthcare to individuals in our community and beyond.”

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

More than 30% of clinical trials fail due to adverse drug reactions, and the up to $5,054,235.00 contract award by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Computational ADME-Tox and Physiology Analysis for Safer Therapeutics (CATALYST) program, will address this longstanding challenge in drug development.

“Each year, many promising drugs fail in trials because animal tests and short-term lab studies cannot predict how medicines behave in real people over time,” said Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, vice chair of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai and the project's lead investigator. “These failures delay lifesaving treatments and drive up drug development costs.”

The new platform, called KronosRx, aims to reduce these failures by applying AI tools to “patient avatars”—sophisticated organoids and organ-on-chip systems derived from human stem cells—to help investigators predict drug toxicity that might otherwise harm clinical trial participants.

The avatars use tiny numbers of cells to mimic the function of whole organs and their immediate response to experimental medications. The AI models in the platform are trained using millions of anonymous patient data points from Cedars-Sinai’s extensive electronic health record network. The resulting platform can forecast an organ’s response to a medication over time—and across the diverse population of patients reflected in the Cedars-Sinai data.

“These AI systems don’t just predict whether a drug is safe or toxic; they model how risk evolves dynamically, accounting for age, a patient’s health, and other medications they might be taking,” Tatonetti said.

Investigators hope this approach will allow better predictive modeling that can evolve over time, reducing reliance on animal studies and improving safety for all patients.

“By creating a more reliable and human-relevant method for safety assessment, the KronosRx project aims to improve clinical trials and to shorten development timelines,” said Clive Svendsen, PhD, executive director of the Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute and an investigator on the KronosRx project.

The Cedars-Sinai KronosRx team includes leaders in computational biomedical innovation, stem cell biology and health informatics.

Tatonetti is leading project integration using biomedical data science and AI-driven drug discovery methods. Svendsen is applying induced pluripotent stem cells and organ chip technologies to better understand how common drugs may cause rare neurological side effects.

Arun Sharma, PhD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Center for Space Medicine Research in the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, is using patient-specific cardiac organoid and organ chip systems to assess drug-induced cardiotoxicity. Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez, PhD, professor and vice chair for Research and Education in the Department of Computational Biomedicine, is advancing the project’s AI and unstructured text data integration to connect molecular and clinical phenotypes.

The ultimate goal, Svendsen said, is to make critical treatments available to patients sooner.

“This approach allows AI to continually refine its forecasts as new evidence emerges, bridging the gap between computational prediction and real-world patient outcomes,” Svendsen said.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

A follow-up to a successful inaugural event in 2024, the symposium sought to advance the practical deployment of artificial intelligence in healthcare. Attendees from more than 40 institutions explored how to implement AI within clinical settings during the Dec. 12-13 event while addressing critical regulatory and ethical considerations.

“The event was designed to offer a road map to help health systems innovate, implement and integrate AI technologies to improve patient outcomes,” said Sumeet Chugh, MD, vice dean and chief artificial intelligence health research officer at Cedars-Sinai and co-chair of the symposium. “By convening experts from around the world, we created opportunities to exchange ideas, tackle challenges and accelerate the safe and effective use of AI in healthcare.”

The partnership between co-hosts Cedars-Sinai and UHN emphasizes the importance of global collaboration in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

“UHN is proud to partner with Cedars-Sinai and co-host this collaborative international symposium dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence in medicine,” said Barry Rubin, PhD, program medical director of UHN’s Peter Munk Cardiac Centre and symposium co-chair. “Our goal at UHN is to integrate AI and digital tools to improve patient outcomes and enhance the precision, speed and personalization of treatment.”

During a fireside chat, Peter L. Slavin, MD, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai Health System, and Kevin Smith, PhD, president and CEO of UHN, discussed the need to maintain strong organizational culture while leveraging AI to enhance care delivery.

“In a time when forces are pulling countries and people apart, partnerships like these are essential,” Slavin said.  “AI should not only improve efficiencies but also ensure equity in care and democratize access to information for patients.”

Smith also emphasized his hope for AI to transform care delivery without jeopardizing culture.

“Culture is our bedrock,” Smith said. “We strive to integrate AI into our workflows to improve lives, outcomes and efficiencies—without changing the culture of our unique medical center.”

The event featured panel discussions and debates on pressing topics that included data privacy, the need to train future clinicians on AI documentation tools, and the challenges of data usage and commercialization.

“Provocative topics and debates were purposeful,” Chugh said. “To answer tough questions, we first have to stimulate the conversations that will address these challenges.”

Cedars-Sinai and UHN have committed to reconvening for the third annual symposium in December 2026, continuing their shared mission to lead the global conversation on responsible AI integration in medicine.

Read More From the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom: Cedars-Sinai Strengthens AI Foundation, Accelerates Momentum

As Mouneer Odeh, MA, chief data and artificial intelligence officer at Cedars-Sinai, looks back on the year, he reflects on how the organization deployed AI broadly across clinical, academic and administrative areas to drive clinical and operational excellence and to train the next generation of clinicians, scientists and healthcare professionals.

“AI is not just a tool; it is a catalyst for innovation and transformation,” Odeh said. “Our work this past year centered on translating innovative ideas into solutions with real-world impact and solutions that improve care, enhance discovery and teaching, and create greater efficiencies.”

Odeh said that as he looks at how AI will advance Cedars-Sinai’s work in the year ahead, “our focus for AI is rooted in our mission—elevating the health status of the communities we serve. The pace of innovation is accelerating, and the cumulative impact is growing.”

Under Odeh’s leadership in 2025, the Cedars-Sinai AI Council—a multidisciplinary team comprising clinicians, investigators, data experts and others—helped implement and advance dozens of AI initiatives. These are a few of those achievements.

Delivering Quality Care and Outcomes

Cedars-Sinai was the first health system to launch Aiva Nurse Assistant—initially a pilot program on a 48-bed surgical unit—an artificial intelligence mobile app that allows nurses to use a mobile phone to document patient information in real time through voice dictation.

The app transcribes the data and then—once validated by a clinician—files that information directly into a patient’s electronic medical record. The app is now being deployed across Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with the goal of reducing administrative burdens and fostering increased efficiencies and innovation.   

Another pilot program, Momentum Spine, launched this year at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s for pediatric patients with scoliosis. The monitoring platform enables radiation-free scoliosis assessments and digital models of the patient’s spine. With this real-time tracking of brace wear and scoliosis progression, clinicians have seen an increase in compliance and a reduced need for frequent in-person visits. Cedars-Sinai is planning to expand the program in 2026.

Easing and Expediting Access

The Cedars-Sinai Connect mobile app, launched two years ago, allows Californians to quickly and easily access Cedars-Sinai experts for sick, chronic and preventive care—24/7. In 2025, the AI tool—developed by K Health—expanded to support children and Spanish speakers in the state. While the mobile app brings ease and expedited access to patients, it also reduces administrative burdens like data entry, freeing up more time for clinicians to spend meaningful time with their patients.

The initial success of Cedars-Sinai Connect led investigators to study whether physicians or artificial intelligence offer better treatment recommendations for patients examined through a virtual urgent care setting. A 2025 study published in Annals of Internal Medicine found that initial AI recommendations for common complaints in an urgent care setting were rated higher than final physician recommendations.

While AI was shown to be better at identifying critical red flags, physicians were better at eliciting a more complete history from patients and adapting their recommendations accordingly.

Offering Hands-On Health AI Education

With the launch of Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University, new training programs in AI, big data and machine learning emerged.

The newly established PhD in Health Artificial Intelligence (AI) program earned accreditation from the Senior College and University Commission of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The program is the first in the U.S. to be embedded in a hospital and the first to combine interdisciplinary academic training with hands-on clinical data experience, giving students opportunities to develop AI solutions that could improve diagnostics, patient care and healthcare delivery.

Cedars-Sinai’s National AI Campus—a project-based learning program that brings together AI experts and students from various educational and professional levels—expanded in 2025 to include the first community college, L.A. Pierce College. The initiative addresses challenging problems in science and medicine using AI and machine learning and includes more than 80 partner institutions from 31 states.

Accelerating Research Discoveries

Cedars-Sinai’s research enterprise produced a swath of science in 2025, with dozens of studies focused on advancing the use of artificial intelligence in laboratories and clinics.

These studies included the use of AI to improve mental health therapy, the trending use of agentic AI, how AI can be used to improve drug safety and catch medication risks, potential bias in AI-generated treatments for psychiatric patients, and how the medical center is using synthetic data for clinical innovation.  

Teaching and Training to Ease Administrative Burdens

In 2025, the Enterprise Information Services (EIS) team appointed three key leaders to help implement tools and technologies that can reduce burdens among clinicians: a chief health informatics officer, chief nursing informatics officer and chief medical informatics officer.

The medical center also named the inaugural vice dean and chief artificial intelligence health research officer, who will oversee the newly created AI in Medicine Research Center. The center works collaboratively with the Research section of Enterprise Information Services to build and grow the clinical AI research innovation engine.

Through events like the Cedars-Sinai Prompt-A-Thon, employees worked alongside technical coaches and created their own custom AI prototypes, then optimized the solutions through several iterations of improvements and developed roadmaps for expanding the tools for broader uses.

Additionally, more than 1,000 colleagues were trained on AI prompting, and more than 6,000 users have opted in to use Cedars-Sinai’s proprietary GPT platform. These administrative opportunities aim to encourage the broad use of AI to better reduce inefficiencies and administrative burdens.  

Read more in Cedars-Sinai Discoveries: Cedars-Sinai Pioneers a New Era for AI Education

Synthetic data platforms use artificial intelligence to produce new data that mimics real-world patient data, without disclosing any private information. This approach allows organizations like Cedars-Sinai to simulate various scenarios and outcomes, providing valuable insights for medical research and clinical decision-making, while still maintaining a high level of accuracy and validity in research findings.

For example, Cedars-Sinai can take real patient data and convert it into a new dataset that reflects patient profiles and treatment scenarios. This synthetic dataset could be generated within one hour, offering a significant advantage in speed and efficiency over traditional methods that require time-consuming processes to retrieve real patient data.

“The use of synthetic data at Cedars-Sinai reflects our pursuit of cutting-edge technologies to advance medical research and improve patient care,” said Craig Kwiatkowski, PharmD, senior vice president and chief information officer at Cedars-Sinai. “This supports our broader strategy of building a more connected data ecosystem—one that gives our teams easier access to a wider range of data that helps drive real-world innovation in healthcare.”

To conduct this work, Cedars-Sinai is partnering with Syntho, an Amsterdam-based company that participated in the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program in 2022. Syntho provides artificial intelligence-based, privacy-enhancing technology to generate anonymous synthetic data.

Cedars-Sinai also is exploring the use of synthetic data in tandem with the recent launch of a new Digital Innovation Platform, as it develops a comprehensive data platform tool set to address some of the most pressing challenges in healthcare. The initiative will leverage Cedars-Sinai’s clinical expertise, infrastructure, research capabilities and vast data resources to develop companies that tackle healthcare issues, in partnership with Cedars-Sinai staff, investors and venture-builder Redesign Health.

Jason Moore, PhD, chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine, and Nicholas Tatonetti, PhD, vice chair of Computational Biomedicine, are leading research efforts on synthetic data at Cedars-Sinai. They sat down with the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom to share more about the role of synthetic data in a healthcare setting.

What are the benefits of using synthetic data?

Moore: Synthetic data is generated using artificial intelligence to model various patterns in real data and produce new data that preserves these patterns. This synthetic data does not have the same privacy and security issues as real data, making it easier—and much faster—to use for research. That’s because synthetic data doesn’t require approval from committees or governing bodies like an internal review board.

Synthetic data also makes it easier to collaborate and share information with other internal teams and external institutions.

Tatonetti: The speed, accuracy and sheer volume in which we can access synthetic data opens the door to studying new and complex conditions like rare diseases.  

What is the difference between de-identified data and synthetic data?  

Moore: De-identified data is real data with patient identifiers removed, while synthetic data is completely artificial. This artificial data is generated to preserve the relationships and patterns in the original data, making it useful for research without the privacy concerns associated with real data.

What about the privacy and security of synthetic data?   

Moore: One of the biggest motivators of using synthetic data is to ensure patient privacy and security. Synthetic data eliminates the possibility of re-identifying patients, thus allowing researchers to work with data without the same restrictions as real data.

How will the partnership with Syntho advance our work with synthetic data?

Tatonetti: Through our partnership with Syntho, we hope to achieve three things:

• Lower the barriers to clinical research, allowing more investigators to conduct studies without lengthy approval processes associated with real data
• Speed up the process of launching and dropping studies, enabling researchers to quickly test and iterate on their hypotheses
• Allow students and trainees in the Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University to use synthetic data, providing them with realistic datasets to learn from, build tools on, and conduct analyses.

What are the limitations of synthetic data?

Moore: Synthetic data has limitations and does not handle all data types well—like discrete genetic data—so it’s imperative we understand these limitations in our workflows. It’s also critical we effectively communicate these limitations to our users to prevent user frustration and fatigue.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

(HSU). They are the first to enroll in the new Chuck Lorre Allied Health School, Health Artificial Intelligence PhD program in the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and the Master of Science in Regenerative Medicine program.

“Regardless of their chosen discipline, students in the Health Sciences University will be immersed in the healthcare environment and our clinical care continuums,” said Jeffrey Golden, MD, executive vice dean of Research and Education, director of the Burns and Allen Research Institute, and the Linda and Jim Lippman Distinguished Chair in Academic Medicine at Cedars-Sinai. “Students will train side by side with experts to advance basic, translational and clinical sciences, then witness how their efforts help shape the care Cedars-Sinai delivers.”

The students’ experience will include hands-on training from prominent experts and access to advanced technologies and innovative clinical trials.

The Cedars-Sinai Chuck Lorre Allied Health School was established in 2022 with a $30 million gift from The Chuck Lorre Family Foundation. The vocational school offers training in allied healthcare roles, starting with clinical laboratory scientists, pharmacy technicians, respiratory therapy and radiation therapy technicians.

“When the opportunity presented itself to provide training and certificates for underserved individuals in our community, which in some instances would double their salaries, I was all in,” Lorre said. “Partnering with Cedars-Sinai to create the school of allied health will allow us to see long-term impacts in our communities.”

Students in the allied health programs will receive hands-on training in a clinical setting through rotations at Cedars-Sinai and its affiliates Huntington Health and Torrance Memorial Health. The programs lead to associate degrees, bachelor’s degrees or certificates. Graduates are eligible to obtain licensure and take certification exams in their chosen fields.

“The transformational gift made by The Chuck Lorre Family Foundation meets a tremendous need for allied health specialists, both at Cedars-Sinai and in the broader Los Angeles community,” Golden said.

Alexia Furbert, a 21-year-old Los Angeles resident, is one of the first students to enroll in the pharmacy technician program in the Cedars-Sinai Chuck Lorre Allied Health School.

“When I learned about the program, I was finishing my last semester at West Los Angeles College to complete my associate degree,” Furbert said. “Feeling uncertain about my career goals, I questioned whether transferring to a four-year university was the right decision for me. This program offered an opportunity to explore potential career paths and contribute to chronically understaffed areas of healthcare.”

Also new to the Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is the PhD in Health Artificial Intelligence (AI), which offers rigorous training in AI algorithms and methods, with a focus on analyzing clinical data to enhance patient care.

“We are elated to welcome our incoming students, who will experience a hands‑on, active approach to teaching that reinforces AI concepts through clinical rotations and scholarly collaboration with physicians and medical staff,” said Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez, PhD, director of the Graduate Program in Artificial Intelligence. “Graduates will be positioned to directly improve healthcare and patient outcomes through the rigorous development and deployment of AI algorithms and software.”

Another new offering is the Master of Science in Regenerative Medicine, a 20-month program where students focus on stem cell research that can be used to both model and treat human diseases. The curriculum will focus on three professional paths: cell biomanufacturing, academic research into stem cell biology and learning about how stem cells can be used with different clinical specialties.

“We designed the master’s program to teach students about regenerative medicine and how stem cells hold an interesting promise for medicine,” said Wafa Tawackoli, PhD, director of Education and Training at the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute. “We are focused on giving these students an advantage as they move forward in their chosen career paths through a carefully designed curriculum. Everything we do is tailored to the future.”

The university offers other graduate degrees, including a PhD in Biomedical Sciences, that merges scientific and translational medicine curricula with mentoring by researchers and clinicians, a Master of Science in Health Systems and a Master of Science in Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

The university also is home to several professional training programs, including nondegree educational certifications, formal trainings, internships and other ongoing opportunities to benefit students and professionals at all levels of their careers.

“We are eager to welcome our new and returning students,” Golden said, “and for them to begin their journey of understanding human diseases, how to diagnose them and how to determine the best treatments for individual patients.”

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

In the first study, Cedars-Sinai investigators applied advanced statistical techniques to analyze electronic health records from nearly 100,000 hospital stays. This approach identified drugs that were unexpectedly associated with raising or lowering blood sugar levels of hospitalized patients.

“Our findings offer practical insights to help clinicians anticipate and manage medication-related blood sugar changes, ultimately improving glycemic safety for patients in hospitals,” said Jesse G. Meyer, PhD, assistant professor of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai and corresponding author of the study.

In the second study, co-led by Cedars-Sinai, investigators developed a secure method to pool patient data from multiple hospitals for research studies. This method allows hospitals to send statistical summaries of their patients’ characteristics, rather than the healthcare data of individuals, to a central location for analysis by investigators, reducing the risk of inadvertent disclosure of sensitive patient information.

“Our innovative approach opens the door for larger, more diverse studies that better protect patient privacy, improve research quality and support the development of more effective treatments,” said Ruowang Li, PhD, assistant professor of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai and co-corresponding author of the study.

“Both studies emphasize our unique approach to using machine learning and big data in academic medicine,” said Jason Moore, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai and co-corresponding author of the study. “These studies foster collaboration, ultimately leading to patient care and research that are driven by data, overcoming gaps in outcomes and creating healthier lives.”

First study:

Other Cedars-Sinai authors include: Amanda Momenzadeh, PharmD, Caleb Cranney, MS, So Yung Choi, MS, Catherine Bresee, MS, Mourad Tighiouart, PhD, Roma Gianchandani, MD, Joshua Pevnick, MD, MSHS, and Jason H. Moore, PhD.

Acknowledgments: The authors thank Edward Kowalewski, Kevin Japardi and the Honest Enterprise Research Broker for EHR data extraction services. This research was supported by NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), UCLA CTSI Grant Number UL1TR001881.

Declaration of interests: Amanda Momenzadeh and Jesse G. Meyer have a provisional patent related to this work. Jason H. Moore is a member of Patterns Advisory Board.

Second study:

The other Cedars-Sinai author was Jason H. Moore. Other authors include Luke Benz, Rui Duan, Joshua C. Denny, Hakon Hakonarson, Jonathan D. Mosley, Jordan W. Smoller, Wei-Qi Wei, Thomas Lumley, Marylyn D. Ritchie and Yong Chen (co-corresponding author).

Acknowledgment: Funding sources included NIH R01 LM010098, AG066833, GM148494, LM014344, LM012607, LM013519, AI130460, AG073435, RF1AG077820, R56AG069880, R56AG074604, U01TR003709, R21AI167418 and R21EY034179. MDR was funded by R01HG010067 and R01HL169458.

eMERGE Network (Phase III). This phase of the eMERGE Network was initiated and funded by the NHGRI through the following grants: U01HG8657 (Group Health Cooperative/University of Washington); U01HG8685 (Brigham and Women’s Hospital); U01HG8672 (Vanderbilt University Medical Center); U01HG8666 (Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center); U01HG6379 (Mayo Clinic); U01HG8679 (Geisinger Clinic); U01HG8680 (Columbia University Health Sciences); U01HG8684 (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia); U01HG8673 (Northwestern University); U01HG8701 (Vanderbilt University Medical Center serving as the Coordinating Center); U01HG8676 (Partners Healthcare/Broad Institute); and U01HG8664 (Baylor College of Medicine).

UK Biobank. All data for this cohort pertained to project 32133 – “Integration of multi-organ imaging phenotypes, clinical phenotypes, and genomic data.”

Declaration of interests: Jason H. Moore serves as a current member of the Patterns advisory board. The other authors report no competing interests.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

“These highly accomplished physician-scientists are more than clinicians; they are professors, mentors and supporters of all trainees studying at Cedars-Sinai,” said Jeffrey Golden, MD, executive vice dean for Research and Education at Cedars-Sinai. “Their unique yet complementary leadership roles will further advance our academic health system and bring continued excellence to our Health Sciences University.”

Katznelson, vice dean of Medical Education, and Goldhaber, vice dean of Graduate Education, sat down with the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom to discuss their shared vision for preparing generations of academic scientists, physician leaders and allied health professionals.

What does the role of vice dean of Graduate Education encompass?

Goldhaber: I am responsible for overseeing, strengthening and expanding the educational programs offered by the Cedars-Sinai Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Our programs serve more than 300 scientists in training, ranging from master’s and PhD students to advanced postdoctoral fellows in dozens of scientific research disciplines. I also have oversight responsibility for our clinical scholars and physician-scientist training programs, as well as high school, undergraduate and graduate research programs for visiting students from around the world.

What does the role of vice dean of Medical Education encompass?

Katznelson: I am responsible for all aspects of medical education, including Cedars-Sinai’s Graduate Medical Education, Continuing Medical Education, the Women’s Guild Simulation Center for Advanced Clinical Skills, the Chuck Lorre Allied Health School and the Medical Library, as well as medical student rotations from local, national and international institutions.

What are the priorities for Graduate Education and Medical Education?

Goldhaber: We currently have a Basic and Translational Sciences PhD program with four tracks along with a new PhD in Health Artificial Intelligence. Aside from our two master’s programs, in health systems and magnetic resonance medicine, we are adding new programs in regenerative medicine and translational immunology. We anticipate broadening our educational portfolio with additional master’s and certificate programs in the near future.

We would also like to make it easier for our clinical trainees, residents and fellows focusing on patient care to enroll in our degree and certificate programs as part of their preparation for careers in academic medicine. To help fund these students, we are instituting more organized and streamlined support systems for our faculty to submit training grants to the National Institutes of Health and elsewhere.

Additionally, we are focused on improving our ability to provide federal financial aid to our students, continuously refreshing the curriculum within our existing programs, and providing our faculty with more robust and formal training in the most up-to-date and evidence-based teaching techniques.

Katznelson: I am dedicated to building an infrastructure for medical education, including growing education technology; providing mentorship to our students, residents, fellows and faculty; advising on curricular development and teaching; enhancing medical education research; and creating a community fostering career development in medical education. Strategic planning will be at the heart of my work this year, which focuses on engaging the medical education community in devising the necessary medical education infrastructure, including forming a teaching academy.

Together with Dr. Goldhaber, we will be engaging our medical trainees in research by creating more opportunities, as well as advancing options for scholarly education, as an integrated component of their clinical training.

How do you envision these programs will grow over the next five years?

Goldhaber: My hope is to double the number of programs and students—including clinical trainees—from what we have today, and to continuing building the Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University recognition internationally.

Katznelson: I hope to foster and strengthen the medical education community at Cedars-Sinai. Within five years, we look to have a university that ties together our medical and graduate education programs, with an infrastructure that includes support for our education community. Through this effort, we will strive to have an community that fosters innovation in education and translational sciences, both locally and internationally.

What excites you most about serving as vice dean of Graduate Education?

Goldhaber: I hope that as a leader here, I can serve the students and faculty so that they can exceed their own expectations, which translates into amazing cures for patients everywhere.

What excites you most about serving as vice dean of Medical Education?

Katznelson: There are so many opportunities at Cedars-Sinai. As a top medical center in the nation, we are committed to strengthening all aspects of education and research, and to continuing to offer training positions to the highest-tier candidates for our residency, fellowship, as well as master’s and PhD programs. I am excited to work in an academic medical center fully envisioning and committed to achieving this future.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

The late-breaking study presented at the American College of Physicians Internal Medicine Meeting and published simultaneously in the Annals of Internal Medicine compared initial AI treatment recommendations to final recommendations of physicians who had access to the AI recommendations but may or may not have reviewed them.

“We found that initial AI recommendations for common complaints in an urgent care setting were rated higher than final physician recommendations,” said Joshua Pevnick, MD, MSHS, co-director of the Cedars-Sinai Division of Informatics, associate professor of Medicine and co-senior author of the study. “Artificial intelligence, as an example, was especially successful in flagging urinary tract infections potentially caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and suggesting a culture be ordered before prescribing medications.”

However, Pevnick said that while AI was shown to be better at identifying critical red flags, “physicians were better at eliciting a more complete history from patients and adapting their recommendations accordingly.”

The retrospective study was conducted using data from Cedars-Sinai Connect, a virtual primary and urgent care program that began in 2023. An extension of Cedars-Sinai’s in-person care, Cedars-Sinai Connect aims to expand virtual healthcare for patients in California through a mobile app that allows individuals to quickly and easily access Cedars-Sinai experts for acute, chronic and preventive care.

The study reviewed 461 physician-managed visits with AI recommendations from June 12 through July 14, 2024. Key medical issues addressed during these virtual urgent care visits involved adults with respiratory, urinary, vaginal, vision or dental symptoms.

Patients using the mobile app initiate visits by entering their medical concerns and, for first-time users, providing demographic information. An expert AI model conducts a structured dynamic interview, gathering symptom information and medical history. On average, patients answer 25 questions in five minutes.

An algorithm uses the patient’s answers as well as data from the patient's electronic health record to provide initial information about conditions with related symptoms. After presenting patients with possible diagnoses to explain their symptoms, the mobile app allows patients to initiate a video visit with a physician.

The algorithm also suggests diagnosis and treatment recommendations that can be viewed by the Cedars-Sinai Connect treating physician, though during the time of the study, Cedars-Sinai Connect required physicians to scroll down to view them.

“The major uncertainty of this study is whether physicians scrolled down to view the prescribing, ordering, referral or other management suggestions made by AI, and whether they incorporated these recommendations into their clinical decision-making,” said Caroline Goldzweig, MD, Cedars-Sinai Medical Network chief medical officer and co-senior author of the study. “The fact that the AI recommendations were often rated as higher quality than physician decisions, however, suggests that AI decision support, when implemented effectively at the point of care, has the potential to improve clinical decision-making for common and acute conditions.”

The AI system used for Cedars-Sinai Connect is developed by K Health, which created the technology to reduce the burdens of clinical intake and data entry, allowing doctors to focus more on patient care. K Health and Cedars-Sinai developed Cedars-Sinai Connect through a joint venture and collaborated on the research study. Investigators from Tel Aviv University, including first author Dan Zeltzer, PhD, also participated in the study.

“We put AI to the test in real-world conditions, not contrived scenarios,” said Ran Shaul, co-founder and chief product officer of K Health. “In the reality of everyday primary care, there are so many variables and factors—you’re dealing with complex human beings, and any given AI has to deal with incomplete data and a very diverse set of patients.”

Shaul said the investigators learned that if you train the AI on the treasure trove of de-identified clinical notes and use day-to-day provider care as an always-on reinforcement learning mechanism, “you can reach the level of accuracy you would expect from a human doctor.”

Other authors involved in the study include Dan Zeltzer, PhD; Zehavi Kugler, MD; Lior Hayat, MD; Tamar Brufman, MD; Ran Ilan Ber, PhD; Keren Leibovich, PhD; Tom Beer, MSc; and Ilan Frank, MSc.

This work was supported with funding by K Health.

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The hottest trend on the horizon for artificial intelligence (AI) is agentic AI, according to

Unlike traditional AI that is primarily designed to complete a single task, agentic AI is a new generation of AI models that can independently perform multiple tasks simultaneously to achieve specific objectives.

At Cedars-Sinai, Moore and colleagues are immersed in agentic AI models, creating algorithms that make faster and more accurate decisions while combing through large datasets. Moore, professor of Computational Biomedicine and Medicine, sat down with the Cedars-Sinai Newsroom to explain the potential—and recent boom—in the use of agentic AI.

What is agentic AI and how does it differ from existing AI models?

For the past 10 years we have been developing state-of-the-art AI methods, including deep-learning algorithms and large language models for natural language processing. These methods have been designed to complete one specific task—for example, to analyze an echocardiogram image of the heart to find defects.

Agentic AI, however, assembles teams of AI specialists to complete specific tasks—then collectively brings these teams together to solve a complex problem. Using the same echocardiogram example, an agentic AI model can simultaneously analyze echocardiogram images, laboratory tests, vital signs, medication history and clinical notes to provide a comprehensive picture of a patient in a fraction of the time it would take multiple clinicians to review results.

This technique mirrors the way humans solve complex problems.  

What makes agentic AI the next hottest trend in AI?

ChatGPT has shown we can use powerful algorithms for specific tasks. With agentic AI, algorithms are tailored to specific needs and adapts strategies independently to achieve predefined goals. It can assemble teams of AI agents to handle various tasks.

In my laboratory, for example, we work with big data. So, we need people whose expertise is in cleaning data, preparing it for analysis, building computational models with the data and providing statistical analysis. We also need people who can interpret the data for us; what does the data tell us about biology, clinical care, etc.? We then need someone to summarize all of these results in written form, then prepare graphs and figures to communicate these results.

Agentic AI builds teams of AI agents that handle each of these respective areas, with the end goal of providing understanding of the data and explanation of the results.

The field is advancing in a way that individuals may soon use these methods at home. I expect to see many tools coming out in the next year or so that will make our lives easier. One can imagine an AI agent helping prepare your taxes, your family budget, or preparing your weekly grocery list.

Is there published research happening in agentic AI?

Yes, we are seeing an uptick in published research studies involving agentic AI. Our laboratory recently published a study in Bioinformatics about an agentic AI model we created called ESCARGOT (Enhanced Strategy and Cypher-driven Analysis and Reasoning using Graph Of Thoughts).

The ESCARGOT model combines large language models with a dynamic “graph of thoughts” and biomedical knowledge graphs—an approach that was shown to improve output reliability and reduce inaccuracies. To do this, we inputted existing data we have procured about Alzheimer’s disease, then asked the agentic AI model to provide several things: genes associated with the disease, drugs and therapies that may offer the best treatments for these genetic variations, etc.

We compared these findings to the responses ChatGPT produced and, not shockingly, agentic AI provided answers with 80%-90% accuracy, compared to ChatGPT, which scored about 50%.

We believe strongly in making our models open-access to ensure science progresses. The ESCARGOT model is public, free and available on GitHub.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

The lifetime honor recognizes Melmed, the Helene A. and Philip E. Hixon Distinguished Chair in Investigative Medicine, for his decades of significant contributions to the field of endocrinology, particularly for revealing biological processes involved in pituitary tumorigenesis and control of hormone production and action.

“Over the course of decades, Dr. Melmed has been an outstanding physician-scientist and a true leader in the field of endocrine biology as evidenced by research from his laboratory that has led to fundamental and translational advances, a commitment to educating the next generation of investigators, and leadership of numerous professional societies,” said Peter L. Slavin, MD, president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai. “He is truly deserving of this honor and recognition.”

Melmed will be welcomed into the association during the annual Fellows Forum in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, June 7.

“I am both humbled by and grateful for this peer-recognized honor, which reflects the longstanding dedication of my laboratory team, including students, postdocs, fellows and colleagues, all engaged in the pursuit of new knowledge underpinning normal and disordered function of the pituitary gland and its hormones,” Melmed said. “The pituitary is indeed the master homeostatic conductor for maintaining cell communication, as well as developmental, metabolic, growth and reproductive homeostasis. I am proud of our contributions to furthering therapeutic advances for our patients with pituitary disorders.”

Melmed’s National Institutes of Health-funded laboratory and pituitary clinic have contributed to alleviating adverse impacts of pituitary failure and pituitary tumors, including prolactinomas, acromegaly, Cushing’s disease and non-secreting adenomas.

Melmed has been a leader at Cedars‑Sinai for more than 40 years and has been the health system’s chief academic officer since 1998. He has trained more than 80 physicians, scientists and graduate students who hold leading positions in academic endocrinology worldwide. He is an editor of Williams Textbook of Endocrinology, edits The Pituitary and was editor-in-chief of Endocrinology and of Pituitary.

Melmed is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians and American Society for Clinical Investigation. He served on the Endocrine Society Council, as president of the International Society of Endocrinology and as president and a founding member of the Pituitary Society. Additionally, he is a member of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s Independent Citizens’ Oversight Committee.

Melmed is a master of the American College of Physicians and has been honored with the Pituitary Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Transatlantic Medal and Dale Medal from the Society for Endocrinology, the Endocrine Society’s Clinical Investigator Award and Outstanding Scholarly Physician Award, and the Royal Society of Medicine’s Clinical Endocrinology Trust Medal.

He earned his medical degree with distinction from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and is a diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine, certified in endocrinology and metabolism.

Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University is advancing groundbreaking research and educating future leaders in medicine, biomedical sciences and allied health sciences. Learn more about the university.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Machine Intelligence, the team demonstrated that DYNA outperforms existing AI models in accurately predicting which changes in DNA, commonly called mutations, are linked to specific cardiovascular conditions and other disorders.

“In recent years, AI has vastly expanded our ability to detect enormous numbers of genetic variants in ever-larger populations,” said Huixin Zhan, PhD, a contributing author of the study from the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai. “But up to half of these variants are of uncertain significance, meaning we don’t know if they cause a disease and, if so, which one. The DYNA model overcomes many of these challenges.”

Current AI models prove to be effective in distinguishing which gene variants, in general, are more likely to negatively affect the structure or function of a protein, which can lead to disease, Zhan said. But these models lack the ability to connect a specific variant to a specific disease, which limits their usefulness in diagnosing or treating patients; DYNA can accurately perform this task.

To develop DYNA, the investigators applied a type of AI known as a Siamese neural network to fine-tune two existing AI models. They used these modified models to predict the probability that specific gene variants are connected to cardiomyopathy (enlargement, stiffening or weakening of the heart muscle) and arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat).

The investigators then compared the DYNA findings to data in an authoritative public database, known as ClinVar, that archives reports of genetic variations classified for diseases. The data showed that DYNA correctly paired the genetic variants with the given diseases.

“For researchers, DYNA provides a flexible framework to study various genetic diseases,” said Jason Moore, PhD, another contributing author of the study and chair of the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai. “Future developments could include using DYNA to offer healthcare professionals advanced tools for tailoring diagnoses and treatments to each individual’s genetic profile.”

The DYNA code is available at GitHub.

The corresponding author of the study is Zijun Zhang, PhD, formerly of Cedars-Sinai.

This work was funded by National Institutes of Health Grants U01 AG066833 (J.H.M.) and R01 LM010098 (J.H.M.)

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“Pathologists traditionally identify relevant structures in diseased tissue by visually examining stained tissue images—a method that is costly, time-consuming and typically reliant on a single type of tissue imaging,” said Kyle Coleman, PhD, an investigator in the Department of Computational Biomedicine at Cedars-Sinai, who led the team that developed the MISO tool. “MISO streamlines this process by integrating detailed molecular information with tissue histology, enabling automated and precise identification of disease-relevant structures.”  

The MISO tool can, for example, distinguish regions with different levels of cancer severity within a single colon cancer tissue sample. Additionally, by integrating transcriptomics, metabolomics, and histology imaging, MISO accurately maps detailed structures of the mouse hippocampus at a high resolution. Investigators hope that MISO can lead to a deeper understanding of disease processes, potentially advancing the development of new therapies.

The MISO software is currently available on GitHub.

Additional authors include Amelia Schroeder, Melanie Loth, Daiwei Zhang, Jeong Hwan Park, Ji-Youn

Sung, Niklas Blank, Alexis J. Cowan, Xuyu Qian, Jianfeng Chen, Jiahui Jiang, Hanying Yan, Laith Z. Samarah, Jean R. Clemenceau, Inyeop Jang, Minji Kim, Isabel Barnfather, Joshua D. Rabinowitz, Yanxiang Deng, Edward B. Lee, Alexander Lazar, Jianjun Gao, Emma E. Furth, Tae Hyun Hwang, Linghua Wang, Christoph A. Thaiss, Jian Hu and Mingyao Li.

Funding: This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants R01HG013185 and R01LM014592.

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