Rutika Mehta, GI Medical Oncologist and Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, shared on LinkedIn by Amanda Pullinger, Co-Founder at Global Female Investors Management, LLC, adding:
“It was a pleasure welcoming Amanda Pullinger and Jessica Alcantar from Debbie’s Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer to NYU Langone Health and the Perlmutter Cancer Center.
As I begin this new chapter leading the Upper GI Program, I’m especially excited about building partnerships that bring together patient advocacy, community engagement, clinical care, and research. Our conversations highlighted several opportunities to collaborate – including raising awareness and improving education around gastric cancer in communities at higher risk here in New York.
Grateful to Anirban Maitra, Manuel Hidalgo Medina, John Leonard, Megan Trenery, and our colleagues for joining the discussion and sharing in this vision.
Thank you, Amanda and Jessica, for visiting and for your continued commitment to patients with gastric cancer. Looking forward to turning these conversations into meaningful initiatives together.”
Quoting Amanda Pullinger:
“After the successful Debbie’s Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer Symposium at Yale last week, Jessica Alcantar and I took the opportunity to visit NYU Langone Health’s Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center in NYC.
Thanks to the kind invitation from our SMAB Member, Rutika Mehta, who recently joined the NYU Langone medical staff as Director of the Upper GI Program, we spent a couple of hours touring the facilities and discussing our mutual areas of interest with the wonderful medical professionals at NYU Langone Health.
We were given a tour of both the clinic and infusion center and had the privilege of hearing one patient “ring the bell” to signal the close of one chapter and the start of another.
Following the tour, we met with some of Rutika’s NYU colleagues, including Manuel Hidalgo Medina, Co-Director of the GI Cancer Center; Anirban Maitra, Director, Perlmutter Cancer Center, Megan Trenery, MPA, Development Office; and John Leonard, MD, Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Hematology and Medical Oncology.
The conversations brought home to us all our organizations’ shared commitment to advancing both patient care and research, and it was great to brainstorm several ways we could work together in the future.
With Debbie’s Dream Foundation: Curing Stomach Cancer hosting this year’s international symposium at the end of October in Seoul, Korea, one such topic was how we could parlay the learnings from our International Symposium into relevant local education amongst the at-risk Asian communities served by NYU in the New York area.
This is why I love these opportunities to connect in-person with the medical professionals who work in the GI Cancer arena! We are all working towards the same goal of better patient outcomes and more supportive patient journeys.
It was also a full-circle moment for me, since I both sat on the NYU Cancer Institute Board in its early days and was a patient at NYU when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009.
With NYU being located on the East River in Manhattan, the views are spectacular, so we took the opportunity to take a few snaps in the conference room following the meeting. Thanks again to our wonderful hosts and we look forward to collaborating with you all soon.”
Other articles featuring Rutika Mehta and Amanda Pullinger on OncoDaily.
