Levy awarded Dacey Medal for Outstanding Cerebrovascular Research

Elad I. Levy, SUNY Distinguished Professor and the L. Nelson Hopkins Endowed Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, has been awarded the Ralph G. Dacey, Jr. Medal for Outstanding Cerebrovascular Research.

The international award was established in 2018 at the Joint Cerebrovascular Section meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS).

Its purpose is to highlight the importance of cerebrovascular research in the field of neurosurgery, foster scientific investigation in the areas of stroke and cerebrovascular disease, and recognize neurological surgeons who have made novel, outstanding and continuous contributions to the basic, translational and/or clinical understanding of cerebrovascular disease.

Levy, co-director of the Gates Stroke Center and Cerebrovascular Surgery at Kaleida Health’s Buffalo General Medical Center/Gates Vascular Institute, and president of UB Neurosurgery (UBNS), received the honor in July at the annual meeting of the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery, which partners with the AANS/CNS CV Section to present the Dacey Medal.

“It was a huge honor to receive the Dacey Medal. It is truly one of the most meaningful awards of my career,” says Levy, who is also a professor of radiology at the Jacobs School. “It is an award that I share with Buffalo because of all of the research and collaboration and the network that exists here that made all of this possible.”

He says the award recognizes the work that was first envisioned by L. Nelson “Nick” Hopkins, SUNY Distinguished Professor of neurosurgery and former chair of the department, which led to UB creating a paradigm shift in stroke treatment.

Led by Hopkins, UB’s team began pioneering new techniques back in the 1990s, using minimally invasive stroke treatments.

That work continues under Levy, who completed his neurosurgery fellowship under Hopkins in 2003, joined the UB faculty in 2004. He was named chair of neurosurgery in 2013.

With almost 800 peer-reviewed publications in cerebrovascular disease research, Levy helped create a paradigm shift where thrombectomy, the removal of a blood clot from a blood vessel, became the new standard of care for stroke after a decade-and-a-half of intensive research.

“What started with the first animal model for intracranial stent in our labs at UB, we then took that knowledge to get the first FDA-approved ‘stent for stroke’ trial,” Levy says.

“We were able to build on this and were among the first to publish data ‘uncoupling’ time dependency from stroke care,” he says. “With multiple New England Journal of Medicine publications, we have galvanized organized medicine around stroke intervention care.”

Adnan Siddiqui, professor and vice chair of neurosurgery at the Jacobs School and CEO and chief medical officer of the Jacobs Institute, started the Dacey Medal when he was chair of the AANS/CNS CV Section. It is named after Ralph G. Dacey Jr., the longstanding chair of neurosurgery at Washington University in St. Louis, who Siddiqui says was an incredible scientist and cerebrovascular surgeon with a storied history of conducting both clinical and translational research.

“We really wanted to honor people who dedicated their entire career to the development of the science of neurosurgery,” says Siddiqui.

Because this was the first year Siddiqui wasn’t on the nominating committee, he was able to nominate someone — and he chose Levy.

“The reason I did this is Elad,” he says. “From the get-go when he came to Buffalo in 2003, he got into basic science and developed the translational research models for intercranial stenting.”

Siddiqui notes Levy then took that idea into the clinic and got the very first FDA-approved trials for intercranial stenting and the first randomized trial.

That led to the first few clinical trials for stents for stroke, followed by Levy being the national principal investigator for the landmark global trial SWIFT PRIME, which resulted in the entire space changing, according to Kenneth V. Snyder, assistant professor of neurosurgery.

“That ultimately showed mechanical thrombectomy in patients with large vessel occlusion showed improved outcomes compared to medicine (tissue plasminogen activator or tPA) alone,” Snyder says. “This work has led to a major change in the paradigm of stroke treatment and new American Heart Association/American Stroke Association acute ischemic stroke guidelines.”

Siddiqui agrees the SWIFT PRIME trial findings essentially turned stroke into a surgical disease. “Elad has been part and parcel of all of that, starting in the lab, all the way to this becoming law of the land, guidelines and best practices,” he adds. “He has shown great leadership.”