Improving Diversity in Autism Genomic Research

The Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment partnered with Centro Ann Sullivan Del Perú to serve children with autism spectrum disorder and their families. Above, Pilar Trelles, MD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, conducting an evaluation with a family in Lima, Peru.

Genomic research is now an integral part of the study and treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and related neurodevelopmental disabilities, so it is crucial to include more ethnically and racially diverse populations, said Pilar Trelles, MD, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment, who was the featured speaker for a virtual talk hosted by the Office for Diversity and Inclusion (ODI) at Mount Sinai. The session, “Forming Community Ties to Improve Diversity in Autism Genomic Research,” is available here.

The talk was part of the Raising Disability Awareness Virtual Talk Series, launched by ODI in 2020, which featured speakers from around the Mount Sinai Health System and the community to raise awareness and promote an inclusive and equitable work place and health care environment for people with disabilities.

“Data contained in the National Human Genome Research Institute and European Bioinformatics Institute Genome-Wide Association Studies Catalog indicate that most of the individual genetic samples—78 percent—come from individuals of European descent,” said Dr. Trelles, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  “And this is translating into clinical practice, because we are learning less about individuals of diverse ancestry.”

Pilar Trelles, MD, is a psychiatrist and researcher with the Seaver Autism Center for Research and Treatment at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Dr. Trelles and other staff at the Seaver Autism Center are dedicated to caring for people of all ages with ASD, leading clinical trials, and furthering research into drug development, molecular targeting, neurology, and genomics. She said that disparities and barriers exist overall for people with ASD who belong to minority groups. Some of these barriers include lack of trust in research—often based on historic inequities in science and health care—limited representation of minorities in science, a lack of cultural competency among physicians and scientists, and a lack of infrastructure.

To combat disparity and increase the accessibility to care, Dr. Trelles collaborated with families and children with ASD in Peru, creating an international partnership between the nonprofit Centro Ann Sullivan Del Perú and the Seaver Autism Center. The partnership is intended to “promote family and caregiver empowerment, educational programs, and collection of bio-specimens for genetic analysis and clinical information,” she said. The goal for the future of health care for people with ASD and their families is to develop a strong partnership where there is a clear and direct benefit to the community.

“It cannot be a one-time thing, it has to be a sustainable model that will last over time,” Dr. Trelles said. As a result of increasing accessibility where possible, her team found that compared with 2016, there has been a significant increase of Asian, Black, mixed ancestry, and Hispanic people in research participation.

Dr. Trelles ended her talk on a hopeful note. “The idea is to work with communities that could benefit from the expertise that we have, where we can actually bring a clear benefit, and provide better care and education for families,” she said. “So that we can build trust and transparency moving forward.” For more information, visit the Seaver Autism Center site.

Additional disabilities-related resources are available on the Mount Sinai Office for Diversity and Inclusion site.

 

A Major Breakthrough and Potential New Treatment for Children With an Inflammatory Blood Disease

Miriam Merad, MD, PhD

A 17-year quest to understand Langerhans-cell histiocytosis (LCH)—an inflammatory blood disease that mostly affects children and can result in dementia and death—has led researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and their colleagues in Texas to a transformational discovery and a potential new treatment. Their findings were published in May in Nature Medicine.

The team, led by Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai, and Carl E. Allen, MD, PhD, Professor of Pediatrics, Hematology-Oncology, at Baylor College of Medicine, found that individuals with LCH have a mutation that puts a subset of white blood cells into a state called senescence. In this state, the cells stop multiplying as they normally would, express a pro-survival gene, and begin producing inflammatory molecules.

Lesions, a hallmark of the disease, form wherever the inflammation occurs, on the skin and in various organs including the brain and central nervous system, manifesting differently in each patient and causing a range of severity. Roughly one in 100,000 children in the United States develops LCH each year, putting it on par with the incidence of pediatric Hodgkin lymphoma, the third most common cancer in children. LCH appears to be most prevalent in the Middle East and countries such as China.

Understanding the role senescence plays in LCH has enabled the researchers to find a potential treatment that “attacks the cause of the problem,” says Dr. Merad. “We have a therapeutic molecule that can get at this pathway and block the ability of these senescent cells to survive.” When the researchers tested the molecule in animal models and on human cells they found the diseased cells were “super-addicted to this survival signal. So now we have a way of blocking the survival signal.”

Plans are underway, she adds, to launch an international, multi-site clinical trial in September, in conjunction with a pharmaceutical sponsor and the National Institutes of Health. Details will be released when the contracts are formalized.

If successful, Dr. Merad says the therapeutic molecule would replace the use of chemotherapy, the current standard of care, which fails to work in the majority of cases. Chemotherapy helps to eliminate some of the inflammation, she says, but it also kills healthy cells and is unable to reach the diseased cells.

Even with the latest breakthrough, LCH remains a baffling disease. It is not inherited, and there appears to be only one mutation. “It’s very unique,” says Dr. Merad. “We don’t know the cause or what makes some kids more at risk.” Upcoming clinical trials should help shed more light on the disease mechanisms.

Drs. Merad and Allen have been collaborating on LCH research since 2004, when they met at a conference in Greece, which was sponsored by the father of a child with a severe case of LCH, who was frustrated by the lack of scientific knowledge. Five years later, Drs. Merad and Allen were the first to describe LCH as a disease of the hematic system—blood vessels that carry blood throughout the body—which originates in the bone marrow. Prior to that, LCH was categorized as a type of skin cancer.

“This disease should be classified as an inflammatory hematological disease,” says Dr. Merad. “There’s no proliferation; the cell never metastasizes. What we’ve discovered in this latest paper is that the mutation puts the cells into a state that is not cancerous, but one in which the cells are fighting not to expand. They start producing a lot of inflammatory molecules because they sense there is danger. This inflammation is the cause of most of the symptoms.”

She says the next piece of the LCH puzzle will be figuring out how to prevent the disease from causing neurodegenerative damage.

The 17-year journey to reach this latest discovery has been a “story of friendship, commitment, and perseverance,” says Dr. Merad. It was her mentor, the late Nobel laureate Ralph M.  Steinman, MD, who first asked her to join him in studying LCH and brought her to the 2004 conference where she met Dr. Allen. She became committed to understanding the baffling disease after being greeted at the door by the organizer’s teenage son, who had LCH, and by his father, who had enlisted some of the world’s leading scientists to find answers.

“What’s beautiful is that this group we formed in 2004 (with Dr. Allen’s lab) is as strong today as it was then,” says Dr. Merad. “We never stopped working on these questions. Science takes perseverance. We start with the question, and we dig and dig until we have something solid and then we put it out there. No matter what it takes we continue to work on it.”

Mount Sinai Establishes the First Link Between Ultrafine Air Pollutants and Asthma in Children

Unlike larger air pollutants, ultrafine particles are able to burrow deeply into the mother’s lungs, cross the placenta, and reach the developing fetus.

The link between prenatal exposure to ultrafine particles in air pollution and the development of asthma in preschool-age children has been established for the first time in the United States by a team of scientists led by Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, Dean for Translational Biomedical Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Co-Director of the Mount Sinai Institute for Exposomic Research.

Ultrafine particles—the tiniest of toxins released into the air from forest fires, tobacco smoke, automobile and manufacturing emissions, and other sources—are believed to be particularly dangerous to human health. Less than 100 nanometers in diameter or 1/1000th of a human hair, they are able to burrow deeply into the lungs, pass into the bloodstream, and penetrate the placental barrier. Until recently, these particles went largely unmeasured. But increased interest from environmental researchers has led to the development of more sophisticated tools that are beginning to capture the pollutants before they disperse, and link them to health databases.

“If you’re thinking about the placenta as being the gateway into the fetus—these particles can more readily get to the other side and have more direct effects upon the developing infant,” says Dr. Wright. “Once the ultrafine particulates are in the bloodstream they can travel anywhere and have broad health impacts.”

Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH

In the study led by Dr. Wright and published recently in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 18 percent of the children of mothers who lived in a higher-risk urban population and were exposed to ultrafine particles during pregnancy developed asthma by the age of three, compared with 7 percent of children in the general population. The study included 376 mothers and their children, most of them Black or Latinx, who lived near high-traffic roadways in the Boston metropolitan area. More than half of the mothers reported having a high school education or less.

The researchers found that female children, in particular, were more susceptible to asthma when exposed to these particles during the third trimester of their mother’s pregnancy, whereas male children had an elevated risk when exposed throughout the pregnancy. According to the research team, further investigation will be needed to explain these differences.

“This is the first study in the United States to show this is happening in our cities in the Northeast,” says Dr. Wright. “We now have to look across different cities and settings, such as areas where we’re experiencing wildfires.”

Measuring the harmful effects of ultrafine particles on other parts of the body needs to be done, as well. “Here we’re focused on pregnancy and asthma, but particulate air pollutants can also affect brain development, so, for example, we need to be looking at ultrafine particles exposure in pregnancy in relation to neurodevelopment in kids, too,” she says.

The study—a collaboration between Dr. Wright, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Tufts University, and researchers at Harvard University—also sheds light on health disparities, since the mothers lived in underprivileged neighborhoods that tend to be closer to congested roadways with higher levels of air pollution.

“Some people don’t have a lot of choices related to affordable housing. There’s also other factors in these communities impacting health. For example, these populations may experience a lot more stress,” says Dr. Wright. “Higher stress interacts with air pollution to magnify the effects of pollutants. Financial strain, more toxic work environments, more adverse life events to deal with. These emotional challenges are pushing and pulling on the same systems in our bodies that are trying to keep us on a healthy trajectory. This includes our immune system, which plays a significant role in asthma risk. There is an optimal balance that we all strive to maintain and when we are stressed and don’t get enough sleep or we’re not eating right, we’re more likely to get sick. Look at how COVID-19 is hitting those same populations harder. They’re already breathing more toxins in the air and experiencing greater stress that throws our immune system out of balance, and this can impact someone’s vulnerability to viral infections.”

The good news, she says, is that there are short-term ways to mitigate the negative effects of stress and pollution, and health care providers have an important role in educating the public, particularly pregnant women.

“We don’t want to just keep telling people these toxins are out there,” Dr. Wright adds. “We want them to know there are things they can do to counter them.”

These include regular exercise and a diet high in antioxidants, such as beans and berries, and certain polyunsaturated fatty acids found in salmon, walnuts, and sunflower seeds.

“At the same time,” she says, “we have to work on longer-term solutions, such as increasing access to healthy, affordable housing, better educational and job opportunities, and nutritious foods.”

 

Mount Sinai Awarded $42 Million to Prepare for Future Pandemics and Advance Influenza Research

Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, left, and Shashank Tripathi, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology. File photo

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has awarded the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a seven-year contract valued at more than $42 million to advance basic research into influenza and COVID-19, and prepare for future pandemics.

This marks the third time Mount Sinai has received a seven-year NIAID contract under the leadership of Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute and Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine, who serves as Principal Investigator. Florian Krammer, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor in Vaccinology; and Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, Pathology, and Medicine (Infectious Diseases), will serve as the contract’s co-investigators.

“This contract represents 21 years of continuity in conducting research that leads to better treatments, better vaccines, better disease management, and better prevention of pandemics,” says Dr. García-Sastre.

The team’s work will lay the foundation for diagnostics, therapeutics, and clinical trials, but will not include the actual implementation of the clinical trials. The contract also calls for the surveillance of emerging pathogens, risk assessment studies on as many as 15 respiratory viruses each year, and training of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. “Training is part of the fight against infectious diseases. You need the people and the weapons,” says Dr. García-Sastre.

Mount Sinai’s previous NIAID contracts have led to many advances. In response to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, Dr. García-Sastre; Peter Palese, PhD, Chair of the Department of Microbiology; and Dr. Krammer launched their seminal work in developing a universal influenza vaccine. The vaccine— administered only once or twice in an individual’s life, rather than each year—has now undergone two phase 1 clinical trials and is expected to move toward a human challenge trial.

Since COVID-19, like influenza, will probably remain within the human population, Dr. García-Sastre says there may be a need to develop a universal COVID vaccine as well.

The new NIAID contract calls for funding of $6 million per year over seven years, but Dr. García-Sastre expects there will be room for additional funding. “The last contract did not have a specific amount of money for COVID-19 because there was no COVID-19 at the time,” he says, so when the pandemic started the government provided extra funding to study and find treatments for the new disease.

In fact, Mount Sinai’s research in influenza allowed the team to respond quickly to COVID-19. “Through this initiative we were able to develop and respond with diagnostics, treatments, and a vaccine,” Dr. García-Sastre says. “We were able to screen compounds that had potential for treatments and by testing COVID-19 proteins we identified targets and inhibitors of these targets.”

Work led by Dr. Palese, in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin, produced a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine that is currently being tested in humans in Vietnam and Thailand, with clinical trials expected to begin in Brazil.

The team has also identified a promising small-molecule drug, plitidepsin, which appears to be particularly effective in stopping the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Clinical trials of plitidepsin are about to start in the United Kingdom, and the Spanish drug maker, PharmaMar, is negotiating with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials in this country as well.

While the new NIAID contract calls for Mount Sinai’s team to take a proactive response to future pandemics, they will also continue to focus on influenza, which remains a major international health concern. Influenza pandemics arise periodically, and according to the World Health Organization, the seasonal viruses infect as many as one billion individuals a year and lead to 650,000 deaths. There is much more to discover about how the human body responds to influenza, says Dr. García-Sastre, and the NIAID contract will support that important work.

COVID-19 Research Roundtable

Almost exactly one year ago, New York City faced the outbreak and first peak of the pandemic, and the city accounted for 25 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the United States. Mount Sinai Health System and health care workers responded to an unprecedented surge of COVID-19 patients, and researchers and scientists immediately shifted gears to support discovery and innovation in improving prevention, treatment, and equity in this disease.

The Blavatnik Family Women’s Health Research Institute similarly began to focus on how the pandemic has affected women’s health, on both the side of the patient and the health care provider. And on April 12, 2021, on the one-year anniversary of the peak, the Institute’s faculty members shared their research findings thus far.

Moderated by the Institute’s Associate Director Teresa Janevic, MD, MPH, the COVID-19 Research Roundtable provided members of the Institute space to share their ongoing work. The event comprised two sections: The Women’s Health Worker, and The Women’s Health Patient.

Caitlin Carr, MD

The Women’s Health Worker panel included Caitlin Carr, MD, a fellow in the Gynecological Oncology program, who discussed her study that focused on mental health among gynecological oncology providers during the pandemic, research that she also presented at the SGO 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting on Women’s Cancers. Her key findings in the gynecological oncology workforce helps to demonstrate that health care worker well-being and mental health during the pandemic is extremely relevant and provides key insight into the improvements and reforms that may be required in a hospital system.

Nina Molenaar, MD, PhD

In the Women’s Health Patient panel, Nina Molenaar, MD, PhD, began by outlining her work in the Generation-C study, which measures perinatal outcomes for women who have COVID-19 while pregnant. Current literature demonstrates that SARS-CoV-2 infection during pregnancy is associated with, among other things, increased risk of preterm birth and C-Section.

The Generation-C study uses serological tests to measure IgG antibody levels of pregnant women receiving obstetrical care in the Mount Sinai Health System and aims to analyze the correlation between seropositivity and pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, small or large for gestational age, NICU admission, and APGAR score. This ongoing prospective cohort study is expanding our understanding of the effects of COVID-19 infection during pregnancy.

Sheela Maru, MD, MPH

Next, Sheela Maru, MD, MPH, shared her findings within the CoronaVirus Impact on Birth Equity (VIBE) Study, which examines the birth experiences and discrimination that birthing people have felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how those experiences and exposures may have had an impact on postpartum health.

This study, which uses a cross-sectional web-based survey, examines patients across Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai West, Elmhurst Hospital Center and Queens Hospital Center, to understand the  satisfaction of women who gave birth during the peak of the pandemic, and how this may differ across race and ethnicity. The VIBE study provides opportunities for interventions to address racism, improve birth satisfaction, and promote positive postpartum health outcomes.

The final presentation of the roundtable was led by Kimberly Glazer, PhD, MPH, who discussed the BFWHRI COVID-19 Perinatal Quality Database, an ongoing effort by the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in collaboration with the Institute to streamline the process of using Electronic Medical Record (EMR) data for in-depth monitoring and evaluation of obstetric quality during the pandemic.

Kimberly Glazer, PhD, MPH

Dr. Glazer discussed how this database of electronic medical records, while designed to produce internal quality reports, also serves as a tool to improve the performance of EMR data in reporting and research. The utility of this approach was demonstrated in the recent Jama Network Open article by Glazer, Janevic, and other BFWHRI faculty members, which used electronic medical records obtained from two hospitals in New York City to determine if racial/ethnic disparities in very preterm birth (VPTB) and preterm birth (PTB) increased during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City.

The Research Roundtable was a success, drawing on an audience across the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Department of Population Health Science and Policy, and Blavatnik Family Women’s Health Research Institute members. The roundtable was not only a demonstration of the abundance of academic knowledge that Institute researchers have worked to discover, in just a little over a year, about COVID-19 and its impacts, but also an illustration of our scientists, clinicians, and researchers’ abilities to persevere.

During the peak of the pandemic in New York City, the core research team within the Institute  continued to meet virtually to discuss various research projects, and quickly mobilized to produce meaningful research investigating the pandemic and its effects on women’s health. BFWHRI researchers have exhibited tremendous productivity and resiliency while navigating work-from-home orders and remaining healthy and safe during these unprecedented times.

The known gender gap in academia means that female academics, particularly those who have children, which represents the vast majority of the Institute’s faculty, report a disproportionate reduction in time dedicated to research relative to what comparable men and women without children experience. And so the COVID-19 Research Roundtable was not only a time to share outstanding research findings and discuss key next steps, but also served as a brief moment of reflection, to appreciate the efforts and challenges overcome thus far, and celebrate a team of outstanding women who have been committed to maternal and infant health equity research throughout the pandemic.

Mahima Krishnamoorthi, BA, is the Clinical Research Coordinator at the Blavatnik Family Women’s Health Research Institute, where she develops and fosters her passion for maternal and infant health equity and reproductive justice. She will be attending Johns Hopkins School of Medicine beginning in August 2021.

 

 

Scientists Celebrate International Day of Immunology and Their Role in Advancing Breakthroughs for COVID-19

Renowned immunologist Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, center, and members of Mount Sinai’s Precision Immunology Institute created T-shirts that support COVID-19 vaccinations in honor of International Day of Immunology.

The significant role the human immune system has played in the spread and containment of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, was the subject of an International Day of Immunology summit, held virtually on Thursday, April 29, 2021, and co-organized by pioneering immunologist Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Merad, who, in 2020, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, also serves as Director of Mount Sinai’s Human Immune Monitoring Center.

Scores of prominent researchers from throughout the world gathered at the summit to celebrate the international collaboration that took place during the pandemic and the speed at which their work was translated into desperately needed treatments. Their deep understanding of the different ways in which the human immune system reacts to SARS-CoV-2 has helped guide the worldwide medical response.

Anthony S. Fauci, MD, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gave opening remarks. “As an immunologist, physician, and U.S. government official, who, for decades, has helped lead the public health response to emerging diseases, it has become clear to me the important role that immunology plays in medicine and in infectious diseases,” he told the audience.

“People with healthy, intact immune systems—such as most young people—can control SARS-CoV-2 infection by limiting its effects to the upper airways in mild symptoms,” Dr. Fauci said. “In contrast, older people or individuals whose immunity is compromised by immunosuppressive agents, or an immune-compromising illness such as cancer, are unlikely to produce a robust immune response that can keep SARS-CoV-2 in check. When the history of this COVID-19 pandemic is written, the discipline of immunology will stand out for its important role in explaining the remarkable protean manifestations of SARS-CoV-2 infection and in enabling us to identify and exploit vulnerabilities in the virus to develop safe and effective vaccines to thwart its pandemic spread.”

Florian Krammer, PhD

The summit’s participants also included Özlem Türecki, MD, Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of BioNTech, the company that partnered with Pfizer to produce the first authorized mRNA vaccine and the first vaccine to fight COVID-19; and Florian Krammer, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor in Vaccinology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who created one of the world’s first antibody tests for SARS-CoV-2.

Dr. Türecki described the development of BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine for COVID-19, which the company dubbed “project light speed,” beginning in January 2020 as soon as virus’ genetic sequence became known. She said BioNTech’s early investment in mRNA technology allowed the company to move quickly, particularly when their scientists expected the pandemic to spread “even faster” than it ultimately did.

BioNTech created 20 vaccine candidates at first, and then pared them down to four. By July, the company selected its “pivotal candidate” for phase 3 efficacy testing. In November, the vaccine was found to be 95 percent effective, and in December, the United States began administering the vaccine under the Food and Drug Administration’s Emergency Use Authorization.

According to Dr. Türecki, BioNTech was able to reach the market quickly by perfecting its manufacturing process at the same time it developed the vaccine. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine has now been authorized in more than 65 countries and administered to more than 260 million people.

Dr. Krammer said that eventually, scientists will “disentangle” the many questions that still remain about SARS-CoV-2 and the adaptive human immune system. For example, will people have long lasting immunity? He also questioned whether it would be advantageous to receive two different COVID-19 vaccines rather than the same one twice.

“But there’s a more pragmatic question here,” he said. “We are in a situation right now where we don’t have enough vaccines, and the production rate of the vaccines that are currently produced and licensed is not high enough to cover the globe and a lot of countries are struggling to get access to vaccines.” Improving the situation is critical.

Indeed, Ester C. Sabino, PhD, Professor, Institute of Tropical Medicine, at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, said, “If we don’t have access to vaccines, then probably herd immunity will never be reached.”

Panelist Adrian Hill, DPhil, Director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University in England, and a co-developer of the AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19, concurred. “The biggest failing in responding to COVID-19 has not been in vaccine technology—they perform really well. And it hasn’t been in the speed of response—that’s been extraordinary,” he said. “It’s been in the lack of physical locations that manufacture vaccines widely around the world. We need to have facilities that can flip overnight to make outbreak pathogen vaccines.”

 

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