Prof. Melissa Cushing, MD Joins Gena Health as Clinical Advisor
· Gena Health Team
Bringing deep expertise in clinical operations, health system leadership, laboratory strategy, and executive management from Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian to help shape Gena’s mission of building the orchestration layer for Precision Oncology.
We are delighted to announce that Prof. Melissa Cushing, MD, has joined Gena Health as a Clinical Advisor.
Prof. Cushing is the Daniel M. Knowles, MD Distinguished Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. She also serves as Executive Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. She is the Medical Director of the Clinical Laboratories and Division Director of Transfusion Medicine and Cellular Therapy at Weill Cornell and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Her work sits at a critical intersection for precision oncology: the point where diagnostic results, laboratory systems, and clinical care converge to inform treatment. With over 200 publications and nearly two decades at one of the world's leading academic medical centres, Prof. Cushing brings deep expertise in how complex clinical systems operate and how they can be improved.
From the laboratory to the clinic
Precision oncology depends on more than just advanced science. It depends on operational infrastructure, simply put, the systems which move information from a laboratory result to a treatment decision. This is where many promising technologies falter: not because they lack capability, but because they fail to account for the realities of clinical operations.
Prof. Cushing has spent her career at this interface. As Executive Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs, she leads initiatives to integrate and standardise clinical laboratories across Weill Cornell Medicine and its affiliated NewYork-Presbyterian campuses. Her work in cellular therapy seeks to translate research-stage treatments into clinical products.
A 2025 systematic review of AI adoption challenges found that workflow misalignment ranks among the top barriers to clinical technology adoption, alongside data quality, infrastructure limitations, and inadequate training. ScienceDirect Tools that do not account for how clinical systems actually function, regardless of their technical sophistication, struggle to gain traction.
Building tools that fit clinical reality
At Gena, we are building an agentic workspace for Precision Oncology which addresses two key bottlenecks within Precision Oncology care delivery: 1) Evidence synthesis and retrieval across multiple, disparate, datasets and tools and 2) Administrative friction within the execution of next steps. We are acutely aware that for these tools to deliver value, they must fit into the operational reality of clinical care from the outset.
Prof. Cushing's expertise in laboratory systems, clinical operations, and translational medicine has the potential to help shape how Gena's tools integrate into the workflows oncologists already use, with the aim of reducing friction rather than adding to it.
Quote from Prof Melissa Cushing, M.D.
“The science of precision oncology has advanced enormously, but the infrastructure to deliver it hasn’t kept pace. I’ve seen through my personal work how important it is to translate what’s possible in the lab into something actionable. I’m looking forward to working toward that goal with Gena, helping it turn the complexity of the precision oncology landscape into something oncologists could actually use in their daily practice.”
Quote from Skomer, CEO and Co Founder Gena Health
“Prof Cushing’s perspective and experience gained from operating at the heart of the intersection between laboratory medicine, clinical operations and translational medicine, at one of the world’s leading hospitals, is a force multiplier for Gena. We are delighted to welcome Melissa to our clinical advisory function”