New Center to Combine Engineering, Precision Medicine

Intending to combine engineering and medicine, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai formed a collaboration that will work to find treatments for conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, several infectious diseases, and tissue degeneration.

The organizations are creating a new entity, known as the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM), which builds on its longstanding partnership that began in 2013. Together, the organizations have gained over $70 million in research funding, 90 percent of which is provided by the National Institutes of Health.

The new center will be headquartered in Manhattan, New York City, and will include a research center in Troy, New York. These locations will focus on making advancements in point-of-care and point-of-use devices.

“This transformative partnership between Rensselaer and Icahn Mount Sinai recognizes that engineering and engineering science is fundamental to the understanding of biomedical phenomena and is essential to the development of the next generation of precision diagnostics and therapeutics, human health and well-being, and to the training of advanced researchers and physicians,” said Shirley Ann Jackson, PhD, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in the press release.

The center will focus its efforts on three research areas. The first area is neuroengineering, which centers on the regulation of neural activity to target neurodegenerative diseases, network analysis, neuro-diagnostics, and computational neurobiology.

The second is immunoengineering, which includes developing designer immune cells, synthetic vaccines, and anti-infectives.

The final area is regenerative and reparative medicine, which encompasses tissue repair and regeneration efforts, organoids, and cellular reprogramming.

“Ultimately, the outcome of CEPM will be new, transformative research projects and innovative technologies that shift clinical paradigms,” said Priti Balchandani, PhD, professor of diagnostic, molecular and interventional radiology, neuroscience, and psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai and co-director of CEPM, in the press release. “And we believe this collaboration will generate new start-ups and attract commercial partners who transform the technologies we pioneer into therapeutic solutions that improve healthcare and have life-changing outcomes for our patients and for society as a whole.”

The CEPM also plans on developing a PhD program to advance innovative efforts within engineering and precision medicine.

Enhancing precision medicine through collaborative efforts has occurred more frequently in recent years.

In August 2021, Harvard Medical School and Clalit Research formed a partnership to further efforts in precision medicine. Specifically, the efforts consisted of two divisions, one dedicated to a family living laboratory and the other focusing on clinical care for rare and complex conditions.

In February, Vanderbilt University announced plans to work with Neumora Therapeutics to research the use of the M4 muscarinic receptor positive allosteric modulator to enhance care for schizophrenia and other conditions.