Research News

to pathology but there’s also an art in communicating the reports to the clinicians,” he explained. “Your goal is to provide a consult service to help clinicians and guide their management, so I try to emphasize that non-medical nuance.”

In June of this year, he received the Chair’s Award for his “fantastic contributions to his various services during a pandemic and during an acute shortage of personnel.”

On the research front, Jean-Gilles has collaborated with colleagues in Radiology and Urology in translational research projects and hopes to do more Cytology related work in the near future.

Outside of work, he and his family enjoy being outdoors, playing sports, and family board games. He is also an avid solo board game player – a niche hobby that’s grown in popularity during quarantine. Games like Anachrony and Robinson Crusoe offer a healthy alternative to video games.

“It has problem solving and makes you read more,” he said. “I always want to read more, and this allows you to read while scratching that puzzle-solving itch.”

RESEARCH NEWS SYMPOSIUM PUTS DATA-DRIVEN WORK ON DISPLAY

Recently, I have been part of a conversation with my colleagues about the value of a new type of testing that is being debated. Some believe the new test is valuable and should be employed post-haste, while others believe that further study is warranted and the test’s clinical utility needs to be better established before it’s used as a diagnostic tool. These conversations have been a reminder of why we do research – to establish whether a hypothesis, however logical and reasoned it may be, has true validity in real-world practice.

On that backdrop, I want to highlight a new publication in the New England Journal of Medicine that challenges current practice in the field of platelet transfusion. Corresponding author and Transfusion Medicine Director, Dr. Neil Blumberg, along with Associate Director Dr. Majed Refaai, PGY-2 resident Dr. Andrew Cardillo and collaborators at URMC demonstrate that the UMRC practice of both leukoreduction and ABO matching of platelets dramatically reduces the need for HLA-matched platelets as compared to rates in the published literature. These data will hopefully influence practice, which will benefit patients who require platelets by both increasing the likelihood that an unmatched platelet transfusion will provide support and by limiting the number of patients who cannot successfully receive platelet support due to the lack of matched products. Kudos to Dr. Blumberg and his co-authors for doing the work to demonstrate the value in their approach and for pushing for improvement in current practice.

The value of research was also highlighted at our recent Pathology Research Day symposium, wherein we

heard from keynote speaker, Dr. James Kirkland, an expert gerontologist and longtime researcher into the biology of aging. Among several highlights, Dr. Kirkland’s talk reminded us of the importance of rigorous clinical trials in assessing the value of interventions in diseases of aging, an area where untested “wellness” approaches are sometimes held up as having value despite a lack of data to back up such claims. During the symposium, we also heard about the research being conducted by our residents alongside their clinical training. Dr. Bennett Wilson won first place honors for his assessment of “Negative Urine Cytology and the Rate of Diagnostic Agreement between Cytotechnologist and Cytopathologist…,” which argued that there may be an appropriate role for cytotechs in signing out negative urine testing. Dr. Chauncey Syposs received an award for his work on “Differential Expression of DLL3 in Merkel Cell Carcinoma Primary Tumors and Metastases,” a study of the Notch pathway Helene McMurray, Ph.D. receptor Delta-like ligand 3 (DLL3) in these cancers. Finally, Dr. Cardillo took third prize for his informatics-oriented work on “InSilico Testing: Accurately Predicting Results of the Direct Antiglobulin Test using Commonly Available Lab Data.” We applaud the important contributions to the biomedical literature from Drs. Wilson, Syposs, Cardillo and all of our trainees and their mentors. As bestexpressed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”