Cynthia Cherfane, M.D. joined the Department of Medicine in the division of Gastroenterology on August 1, 2017.
Dr. Cherfane completed her fellowship in Gastroenterology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and specifically focused her training on immune and inflammatory bowel diseases. Those include ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, indeterminate colitis, pouchitis and celiac disease. She manages these complex diseases and their complications with the most recent therapeutic and endoscopic tools. Her research interests have focused on identifying non-invasive and low cost biomarkers in IBD, and prognostic biomarkers that can help identify high risk IBD patients and guide therapy. She initially published an original research article in the journal Inflammatory Bowel Disease on using monocytosis as a biomarker for disease activity in ulcerative colitis. This work was followed by an oral presentation at the Digestive Disease Week in San Diego for which she received the Early Stage Investigator Award. This work has established the importance of monocytosis in predicting poor outcomes in IBD patients through the analysis of a large cohort containing more than a thousand patients included in an IBD registry. The manuscript is currently under review for publication.
She enjoys working closely with medical students, residents and fellows and is eager to share her knowledge with them and guide them into making medical decisions using evidence-based medicine and the most recent clinical practices in managing IBD patients.