Mount Sinai Opens Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM) hosted its grand opening last week, solidifying a partnership aimed at tackling cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and infectious diseases.

The CEPM, originally announced in May of last year, builds on a longstanding collaboration between the two organizations that began in 2013. Per the original announcement, the new center will be headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, with an additional research center housed in Troy, New York.

Researchers at these locations will focus on advancing point-of-care and point-of-use devices and diagnostic tools in drug development, stem cell applications, cellular engineering, and computational neurobiology.

The Manhattan location will live at the Hudson Research Center (HRC), a mixed-use life sciences hub built by RPI and Mount Sinai.

“The Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine combines the biomedical excellence of Icahn Mount Sinai with the engineering expertise of RPI to create an academic research hub that will make fundamental discoveries and develop new treatments that will improve the lives of patients suffering from the most complex diseases,” said Dennis S. Charney, MD, the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Icahn Mount Sinai, in the press release.

The research center provides both wet and dry labs alongside high-performance computational infrastructure, office space, and open cubicles to help promote interdisciplinary teamwork and collaborative research.

The CEPM’s foundation, the press release states, is built on the belief that engineering is key to understanding various biomedical questions and developing both precision diagnostics and therapeutics. The diversity of Mount Sinai’s patient population is also a major component of the center’s mission to advance precision medicine efforts.

The work of the CEPM will further be bolstered by collaborations with public health, government, and life sciences stakeholders, including New York City’s local government and the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute.

“These two institutions are widely recognized leaders in engineering and medicine, and we are delighted to welcome the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine to the Hudson Research Center by hosting the grand opening event,” said Derrick Rossi, PhD, Interim CEO of NYSCF. “The synergies between NYSCF’s stem cell biology and the engineering and medical expertise at CEPM will lead to new and important collaborations to accelerate discoveries that directly reach patients.”

The center will also offer a joint PhD in engineering medicine with a focus in three research areas.

The first is neuroengineering, which explores minimally invasive control and regulation of central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous system function.

The second, immunoengineering, centers on modulating the immune systems to address cancer and infectious disease.

The third is regenerative and reparative medicine, which concerns renewing and repairing tissue using the body’s healing mechanism.

The program will train students in engineering, entrepreneurship and commercialization, and clinical rotation to facilitate the development of technologies and medical devices to address unmet clinical needs.