NIH Award to Support Informatics-Driven Population Health Research

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has received a $55.5 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).

The health system will use the grant to support its informatics-driven research into new treatments for leading health conditions affecting its population, such as cardiorespiratory and psychiatric disorders, diabetes, malignancies, and infectious diseases.

The grant will support the ongoing work of the Institute for Translational Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, known as ConduITS. ConduITS is one of 63 nationwide CTSA Program sites and is focused on using clinical translational science to improve clinical research, according to the press release.

Using the grant, Mount Sinai plans to leverage its expertise in translational research informatics, digital health, and data science to advance research into discoveries that will lead to better population health outcomes over time. ConduITS will utilize the award to enhance its approach to precision medicine through a precision public health framework that will address health equity challenges via the integration of genomics, environmental health, social determinants of health, and big-data science.

“With this grant, we will be able to expand that infrastructure to, for example, continue building our integrated informatics ecosystem to facilitate big-data science across the network and enhance accessibility to data streams needed for researchers who are tackling society’s most pressing and complex health-related challenges such as health inequities, thus creating the potential to improve outcomes for all across our diverse patient populations,” said Rosalind J. Wright, MD, director of ConduITS, the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital, and dean for translational biomedical sciences at Icahn Mount Sinai, in the press release.

“In this way the grant, and the science that it will facilitate, ultimately has the potential to be highly impactful in the delivery of health care. This infrastructure proved to be critical during the COVID-19 pandemic and enabled the rapid understanding of this new disease and the development of new vaccines and treatments,” she continued.

The health system aims to accelerate the treatment development process, which, the press release states, typically takes 10 to 15 years, by expanding programs that promote workforce diversity, fostering transdisciplinary learning and team science to encourage innovation, engaging translational research stakeholders locally and nationally, and incorporating translational research.

This work is part of Mount Sinai’s ongoing efforts to leverage big data and informatics to bolster population health.

In 2019, the health system launched its Diversity and Inclusion Hub (DIH), a program designed to leverage innovative data and technology to close healthcare gaps and address social determinants of health.

In mid-2020, Mount Sinai received a grant from Microsoft AI for Health to support a new data science center that would use expertise in care delivery, health sciences, artificial intelligence, and digital engineering to support COVID-19 research.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated to clarify that Mount Sinai received a Clinical and Translational Science Award and that NCATS is not a program at 12:00pm ET on October 20, 2022.