From left: Noam Harpaz, MD, Professor of Pathology, and Medicine (Gastroenterology); Sanford J. Grossman, PhD; Judy H. Cho, MD; and Asher A. Kornbluth, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology).
The Sanford J. Grossman Charitable Trust has committed $3 million to a center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai that is focused on advancing the understanding of Crohn’s disease and creating personalized medicine for its treatment.
The trust donated $1 million to establish the Dr. Sanford J. Grossman Center for Integrative Studies in Inflammatory Bowel Disease in 2015. Now it will donate an additional $2 million—$400,000 a year for the next five years.
“Mount Sinai has a large and unique data set on patients: clinical symptoms, pathology reports, genomics, family history, and radiology,” says the founder of the trust, the economist Sanford J. Grossman. “My hope is that the integration and analysis of this data will enable a better understanding of Crohn’s disease, and with that knowledge, therapies will be developed to alter the natural course of the disease.”
Crohn’s is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that affects nearly 700,000 people in the United States. Over time it can damage the bowel and create complications such as strictures, a narrowing section of the intestine that can lead to loss of function and reduce the quality of a patient’s life.
“Our main goal is to develop treatments that specifically deal with stricture in Crohn’s disease, and that aren’t the usual anti-inflammatory treatments,” says Judy H. Cho, MD, Director of the Center, and the Ward-Coleman Chair in Translational Genetics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
One new effort is a small clinical trial led by Robert Hirten, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) at the Icahn School of Medicine, that is exploring whether steroids are beneficial for Crohn’s patients hospitalized with a bowel obstruction caused by stricturing. Dr. Cho is conducting genetic and molecular projects involving pluripotent stem cells that might someday be engineered to repair the defects that cause Crohn’s disease. She says, “We are very grateful for Dr. Grossman’s donation, which will fund our unique, integrative team and catalyze new research.”