Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH
For the past 20 years, the nation’s vast scientific resources have been spent unraveling the human genome. This emphasis now includes the genome’s environmental equivalent—the exposome—as well. At the Mount Sinai Health System, research into the exposome is being led by Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH, Ethel H. Wise Professor of Community Medicine, and the newly named Chair of Preventive Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
“The exposome represents a broad recognition that the genome alone doesn’t predict your health very well. We need to understand why some people who have a genotype for a particular disease never get the disease, while others do,” says Dr. Wright, a nationally known pediatrician, epigeneticist, and environmental epidemiologist. “We all know that there is more to health than our genes. The missing link is the environment. Once we are able to measure the totality of our exposures to chemicals, air pollution, nutritional factors, and psychosocial stressors, then we can develop better treatments and better advise people on how to lower their risk for disease. We can also study how the environment interacts with our genome, which will help explain the observed variability in genetic risk. What we sometimes think of as bad luck is really the environmental risk factor we didn’t measure.”
Under Dr. Wright, the Department of Preventive Medicine recently received a four-year, $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for an ambitious program known as Child Health Exposure Analysis Resources. Mount Sinai was selected as one of six laboratories across the country to measure environmental factors such as air pollution, nutrition, and chemical mixtures, and was the only data center named by the NIH to statistically analyze this trove of information from investigators throughout the United States.
Another program committed to finding links between childhood disease and hazardous exposures is the Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory in the Department of Preventive Medicine, which was founded and is led by Dr. Wright. The lab focuses on areas of pediatric health that include brain development, obesity, and hypertension.
As head of Preventive Medicine, Dr. Wright also plans to expand the services his team provides to 9/11 responders whose health problems stem from their service at the World Trade Center (WTC) site.
As one of seven Clinical Centers of Excellence within the federally funded World Trade Center Health Program, Mount Sinai provides medical and mental health care for WTC-related conditions, as well as data management and analysis for the entire program. Studies by Mount Sinai researchers, for example, have documented various types of cancers, upper and lower respiratory issues, gastrointestinal problems, musculoskeletal disorders, and mental health conditions among the 9/11 responders.
“This patient cohort is aging and our goal is to not only give responders the best possible care today, but also be prepared for the care they will need tomorrow,” says Dr. Wright.
Prior to joining Mount Sinai three years ago, Dr. Wright was a faculty member at Harvard University, worked clinically at Boston Children’s Hospital, and directed the Harvard Superfund Research Program. At Mount Sinai, he has served as Vice Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine and Director of the Division of Environmental Health.