Computational Neuroscientist Opens Doors for New Ideas and Talent to Thrive

Updated on Nov 19, 2025 | Artificial Intelligence, Featured, Research

Computational Neuroscientist Opens Doors for New Ideas and Talent to Thrive

When Kanaka Rajan, PhD, an expert in neural networks, joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in late 2018, it was the school’s way of investing in computational neuroscience. But since establishing her lab, she has achieved new heights not just in her area of study, but in paving roads for future diverse talents to enter what had been a rather homogenous field.

Dr. Rajan, an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in The Friedman Brain Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai, was recently awarded the McKnight Scholar Award, a three-year honor that provides funding to early-career scientists, from the McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota-based organization that has supported work in arts and culture, neuroscience, and climate change.

“I am honored to be recognized by the McKnight Foundation this year. The announcement was such a pleasant surprise,” said Dr. Rajan. Awardees of such programs are not often pure theorists like herself, she said. But the less restricted nature of the funding will advance a new research direction her lab has taken on and will bring much needed exposure to a key problem in science: how does the brain work?

Growing the team

The Rajan lab builds recurrent neural networks—artificial networks of neural nodes or regions inspired by biological brains—toward two core goals. The first is to discover the pattern of cell activity and connectivity in the brain, especially in psychiatric disease models, using these networks. These include exploring how there might be unexpected similarities or differences across species.

One study in that vein was based on what Dr. Rajan calls “functional motifs”—brainwide neural maps that tracked motor dysfunction as a correlated passive coping mechanism, a trait associated with depression.

Larval zebrafish subjected to persistent stress were observed to shut down movement. By comparing computational models of the fish’s neural circuitry against what is known in similar studies in mice and humans, Dr. Rajan could extrapolate how multi-area brain communication and connectivity leads to behavior relevant to neuropsychiatric disease.

The second goal is studying the concept of generalized learning, in which skills learned for one task become applicable to other unrelated problems. This encompasses, among other things, how animals and people are able to multitask, and yet, unlike machines built with artificial intelligence, how people can fail to complete all or some of these tasks perfectly.

A recent breakthrough in generalized learning that Dr. Rajan is working on is getting recurrent neural networks to do “curriculum learning”—training them on designed syllabi of increasingly complex tasks.

The idea of curriculum learning is not new in psychology or cognitive neuroscience, in which animals learn through “shaping.” In a lab setting, animals can be shaped to perform a desired task through reinforcement, for example by rewarding successful completion of sequences of smaller tasks.

An illustrated look at Dr. Rajan’s work

Illustration credit: Jorge Cham

Using this method for recurrent neural networks was born partly out of recognition for how animals and children learn, and in part to address limitations of current training algorithms, Dr. Rajan said. She adds that her lab is among a handful to use curriculum learning in neuroscience, recognizing that understanding how people generalize requires understanding their full learning trajectory.

“It’s an exciting new chapter for this field and I’m hopeful the McKnight Scholar Award will help scale our efforts on this front,” Dr. Rajan said. Her team—comprising four postdoctoral researchers, some of whom are starting independent faculty positions later this year, and three graduate students—looks to add a few more members with the funding.

“This is a competitive field and city to hire scientists in,” she said. “Not only are we competing with other institutions; we’re also competing with industry, so it’s on us to make it an attractive proposition.”

But Dr. Rajan believes Mount Sinai offers something that other institutions or industry players might not: complete intellectual freedom.

“When I first arrived, I was told, ‘Welcome to the department. Let us know if you need anything,’ without any restrictions on my next steps,” Dr. Rajan recalled of her interactions with leadership in the Department of Neuroscience at Icahn Mount Sinai. “This was unlike previous institutions I had been at, where I had been gently nudged where I could or could not direct my research.”

Mapping new paths ahead

Just as Dr. Rajan felt she was given the opportunity to excel as a woman and person of color, she felt compelled to extend those opportunities to those who follow in her footsteps.

Dr. Rajan was allowed to tap her seed funding to start a pilot project in which she turned complex research papers into comic strips to get high school seniors and college students, especially those from disadvantaged communities, interested in joining the neuroscience field.

A peek at how Dr. Rajan makes complex research topics accessible to young students

Illustration credit: Jordan Collver

“There had been artificially high barriers to entry, like girls had been told they’re not good at math, or that AI and/or computational neuroscience are beyond their understanding,” Dr. Rajan said.

By turning complex ideas into jargon-free and engaging formats such as a comic strip, she hopes to help young students realize that they too can enter and flourish in such a technical field. A series of comic strips have been created and steps are underway to distribute them to schools in New York City and other cities.

“When I first started my lab, I had 116 applications to join my team. Guess how many were women?” Dr. Rajan asked. “Two. Computational neuroscience has a representation problem, and I want to fix what I can.” She continued, “I’ve taken small steps, but the ball rolled from Mount Sinai. Here, you see women really get to thrive.”

Helen Mayberg, MD: Seizing Unexpected Opportunities at Every Turn

Jun 8, 2022 | Featured, Research

Helen Mayberg, MD: Seizing Unexpected Opportunities at Every Turn

Depression has long been considered a serious mental disorder caused by extreme stress or a chemical imbalance that is treated by psychotherapy or medication. That is, until Helen Mayberg, MD, Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience, and founding Director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai, took a different approach.

“I am a neurologist, and neurologists map signs and symptoms to specific locations in the brain,” she said. She had always seen depression as a circuit disorder and the availability of brain imaging early in her training provided a method and strategy to study a psychiatric disorder as a neurological one. “That was a novel, if not heretical, idea at the time,” Dr. Mayberg said. “Now, it’s commonplace.”

For her body of work integrating imaging techniques to reveal mechanisms of depression, Dr. Mayberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in May.

Dr. Mayberg considers her career to have taken an unconventional arc. She first trained clinically in neurology at Columbia University, then did a research fellowship in nuclear medicine and functional imaging at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dr. Mayberg held a series of cross-disciplinary appointments in neurology, psychiatry, radiology, neurosurgery, and neuroscience at various institutions, including Johns Hopkins, University of Texas, University of Toronto, and Emory University.

Dr. Mayberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences along with Yasmin Hurd, PhD, Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience and Director of the Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai. Read more about Dr. Hurd’s achievements here.

Over the last 35 years, she had used neuroimaging techniques to study abnormal brain circuits in depressed patients, explaining not just mood, motivation, cognitive, and motor feature characteristics of depression, but also providing a systematic strategy to understand how different treatments work and how to match a patient with an optimal treatment.

Forging partnerships, breaking frontiers

A milestone in her collaborative work came about when Dr. Mayberg discovered the critical role of Brodmann area 25 of the brain, a region of the prefrontal cortex, in negative mood in healthy individuals as well as how it was targeted when antidepressant treatments were successful for depression. The area is known to play a role in mood, appetite, and sleep, but its role in depression was unknown.

Following work on Brodmann area 25, Dr. Mayberg found that deep-brain stimulation—implanted electrodes that deliver electrical stimulation to precise brain locations to treat Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy—was a potential treatment for patients with treatment-resistant depression. Mapping studies she did in the 1990s led to her testing the new treatment in 2003, in which a majority of treated patients showed long-term recovery.

Every move to a new institution has been a scientific adventure with opportunity to work in a new environment with new colleagues, Dr. Mayberg said, but a constant has always been unexpected, exciting, and important new insights. “Creative disruption seems to best describe my trajectory,” she said.

Dr. Mayberg considers transdisciplinary collaboration as the philosophical anchor of her work, one that forms the overarching mission of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics, which she founded in 2018. “The opportunity to fully realize this vision was the condition of my move to New York,” she said.

The Center brings neurology, psychiatry, neurosurgery, imaging, physiology, engineering, and behavioral health under the same roof. Researchers are working on circuit disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which can be treated with deep-brain stimulation, albeit in different brain targets.

“We all knew we needed to work together so that a discovery or new method developed for one disease could inform the others,” Dr. Mayberg said, “so we’re not reinventing the wheel each time.”

Continuing progress through collaborations

Technology innovations in the last several years have further advanced the deep-brain stimulation field, providing new opportunities for Dr. Mayberg and the investigators at the Center. With the capability to read electrophysiological signals in real-time via the stimulating electrodes, researchers at the Center are working on improving delivery of deep-brain stimulation, understanding what kind of patients are most appropriate and why the treatment works.

The Center is also interested in answering more basic questions, such as whether deep-brain stimulation repairs brain circuits or promotes brain plasticity. These studies are complemented by parallel work in animal models at The Friedman Brain Institute. “I consider my research ‘bedside to bench.’ I have always taken advantage of the work of basic neuroscientists, even if their methods cannot be fully applied to human patients,” Dr. Mayberg said.

“My work has had the same basic thread over the course of 35 years: what is the neurology of depression and how do we optimally treat it; not just generally, but in individual patients,” Dr. Mayberg said. “Mount Sinai is the ultimate place for this work, with a committed set of clinicians, scientists, and engineers who share this transdisciplinary vision.”

A closer look at Dr. Mayberg’s work

Dr. Eric Nestler

Eric Nestler, MD, PhD, Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, Director of The Friedman Brain Institute, Dean for Academic Affairs of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Chief Scientific Officer for the Mount Sinai Health System, weighs in on what he found impressive about Dr. Mayberg’s research.

“Dr. Mayberg’s work is all translation since it’s all performed in humans,” said Dr. Nestler, “Even though her research has been tethered in basic neurobiology, thinking about how it intersects with patients is evident.”

Membership of the National Academy of Sciences—considered one of the highest honors for a scientist—comes through election by existing members only. Candidates’ entire bodies of work and contributions to the field are considered as part of the nomination process and their entries are voted on in April each year, with a maximum of 120 U.S. citizens and 30 non-citizens elected annually, according to NAS. There are currently approximately 2,400 U.S. members and 500 international members, of whom 190 have received Nobel prizes. Mount Sinai has six current faculty in the prestigious organization.

Dr. Mayberg had a longstanding track record in using brain imaging to study people with psychiatric disorders, but her breakthrough was using deep-brain stimulation to treat depression.

“What Helen did was extremely novel, especially because this was for a group of patients who had especially severe depression who did not respond to a wide range of existing treatments including electroconvulsive therapy, also known as ’shock’ therapy,” Dr. Nestler said.

The paper on using deep-brain stimulation for depression, published in Neuron in 2005, remains Dr. Mayberg’s most cited work. In her study, six patients with severe depression who had failed at least four different forms of treatment underwent the experimental stimulation procedure. All six saw improvement in clinical scores, with three achieving remission or near-remission that was sustained long term.

“It was a remarkable and brave study and she has since further developed its key findings and implications,” Dr. Nestler said.

Other notable publications from Dr. Mayberg included discovering areas of the brain that were involved in feelings of sadness, and how they exhibited dysfunction in returning to baseline state in people with depression. Dr. Mayberg considered that paper, published May 1999 in The American Journal of Psychiatry, one of her hardest to get published, but it ultimately led to her work with deep-brain stimulation.

“We recruited Dr. Mayberg because we had a great deal of confidence in her multidisciplinary approach,” Dr. Nestler said. “With the additional resources possible at Mount Sinai, she can take the program to the next level.”

Yasmin Hurd, PhD: Asking the Questions No One Was Asking

Updated on Mar 9, 2023 | Featured, Research

Yasmin Hurd, PhD: Asking the Questions No One Was Asking

A couple of decades ago, most people familiar with cannabis called it marijuana—and had probably never heard of cannabidiol (also known as CBD), one of its components.

Today, many people have heard about CBD and its potential therapeutic uses thanks to the work of Yasmin Hurd, PhD, Ward-Coleman Chair of Translational Neuroscience and Director of the Addiction Institute of Mount Sinai, who pioneered research into the compound, cannabis more generally, and their various interactions with substance-use disorders.

“I believe I had been asking questions that no one was asking at the time,” said Dr. Hurd. Her work helped her get elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in May. She is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Hurd’s research focuses on the neurobiology of drug addiction and various psychiatric disorders, spanning both basic science research and translational work in humans. Having evidence in both non-clinical and clinical settings has helped the research be applicable in guiding treatment and health policy, she said.

“Producing research that actually has impact to our society was important to me,” Dr. Hurd said. Through her work in studying molecular impacts of exposure to substances from prenatally to adulthood, including pioneering studies of the human brain, she discovered milestones about the developmental and transgenerational effects of exposure to cannabis, and also its therapeutic potential for treating other forms of addiction, such as with opioids.

“At the time no one knew what cannabidiol was, and today you can even see it being added to coffee in coffee shops,” she said with a laugh.

Dr. Hurd was elected to the National Academy of Sciences along with Helen Mayberg, MD, founding Director of the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai. Read more about Dr. Mayberg’s achievements here.

The Potential of a Limitless Environment

More than a decade ago, in the field of medicine, marijuana was still seen as having limited evidence for being a treatment for any condition and many thought that it was a benign drug without long-term impact on the brain. “My research into the developmental effects of cannabis as well as potential therapeutic aspects of cannabidiol made people take another look at cannabis and have shaped the questions people are asking today,” she said.

Being able to ask the questions that no one was asking requires the combination of the researcher’s driving instinct and institutional support. “I think Mount Sinai helped me to not only ask, but to answer those questions,” Dr. Hurd said.

“Physicians had always focused on treating the adult patient in front of them, but the thinking about what had brought them there in the first place was unaddressed,” she said. As she studied adults with substance-use disorders, she found many had drug exposures early in life, and sought to understand whether those early exposures were linked to psychiatric illnesses later on as adults.

Dr. Hurd recalled that when she joined Mount Sinai in 2006, she pitched ideas about advancing her preclinical work into humans to Dennis Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Icahn Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs of the Mount Sinai Health System. She had begun to study how cannabidiol worked in animal models but had not yet investigated it in live human beings. “Dean Charney said, ‘You could absolutely do that here,’ and just knowing that was possible enabled me to run clinical trials.”

“Early in my career, I never thought that my research would evolve the way it has,” Dr. Hurd said. “Instead of being theoretical about translation, I actually got to study it in humans.”

“The whole thing about being in an environment where there are no limitations placed on you is that it becomes dependent on your drive, on the questions you want to ask,” Dr. Hurd said. “I remember going away from that meeting feeling happy, thinking, ‘Whoa, there are no limits. What do I really want to do now?’”

Even today, that is a question Dr. Hurd asks herself. A constant in her research is for her work to always reveal something relevant to the human condition. As she advanced her work in addiction, she has come to understand that addiction is more a disorder of epigenetics, in contrast to a disease of genetic inheritance.

“Our next phase, especially in medication development, is to see if we can leverage the knowledge about epigenetic dysregulation to develop targeted interventions to reverse addiction,” Dr. Hurd said.

Addressing the Future of Addiction Research

Epigenetic changes are reversible, and this gives rise to hope that addiction ultimately can be, too. “When I started in this field, there was the pervasive stigma of the common phrase ‘Once an addict, always an addict,’” she said. “After studying this for such a long time, I know it’s not true. The effects may be long-lasting, but they are not locked for perpetuity.”

The road ahead will be challenging. Some challenges are merely logistical, such as space issues for animal and clinical research. Others are more systemic. “Those problems I face today remain the same I had at the start of my career,” Dr. Hurd said. “Getting grant money is still challenging, especially for high-risk projects. Stigma still surrounds addiction, even within science.”

Addressing the stigma will help with securing funding. They’re linked, Dr. Hurd said. “But with good support, I believe I’ll get there.”

A closer look at Dr. Hurd’s work

Dr. Eric Nestler

Eric Nestler, MD, PhD, Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, Director of The Friedman Brain Institute, Dean for Academic Affairs of Icahn Mount Sinai, and Chief Scientific Officer for the Mount Sinai Health System, discusses how Dr. Hurd’s work, which comes from asking basic questions, can translate into helping patients.

“Yasmin has always put a premium on mining the results of her work in rats to devise a new understanding for how substances affect humans and also to develop new treatments,” Dr. Nestler said.

Membership of the National Academy of Sciences—considered one of the highest honors for a scientist—comes through election by existing members only. Candidates’ entire bodies of work and contributions to the field are considered as part of the nomination process and their entries are voted on in April each year, with a maximum of 120 U.S. citizens and 30 non-citizens elected annually, according to NAS. There are currently approximately 2,400 U.S. members and 500 international members, of whom 190 have received Nobel prizes. Mount Sinai has six current faculty in the prestigious organization.

Her recent work on epigenetic changes that marijuana causes in the brain and that can be passed across subsequent generations has considerable importance to society, Dr. Nestler said. That paper on epigenetic changes, published in 2021 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, discussed how children from mothers who used cannabis during pregnancy showed higher anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol, compared to children of non-cannabis users.

“As marijuana is increasingly legalized, many people think of marijuana as being extremely safe,” Dr. Nestler said. “Yasmin has shown clearly that it may not be so safe, especially in pregnant women.”

Dr. Hurd’s research on the intersection of cannabinoids and addiction has significant impact too, Dr. Nestler said. Notable publications include her paper, published 2017 in Trends in Neurosciences, that laid out animal model evidence of cannabidiol, a non-high-producing compound derived from cannabis, as a treatment for opioid addiction because it lowers the reward for opioid use.

“That led her to launch a clinical trial that is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse,” Dr. Nestler said, referring to the agency that’s part of the National Institutes of Health. “This is a major milestone for Dr. Hurd’s research program and for the field at large.”

Mount Sinai Launches Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine: What Is it and Why Does it Matter?

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Research, School

Shirley Ann Jackson, PhD, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Priti Balchandani, PhD, and Jonathan Dordick, PhD, attend the launch of the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine.

The opening of the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM) brings together biomedical experts from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and engineering experts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under the same roof.

The center, located on the West Side of Manhattan, represents a first in the city that would bring together two areas of research that greatly benefit from joint development: engineering and precision medicine. The center’s co-directors, Priti Balchandani, PhD, Professor of Diagnostic, Molecular and Interventional Radiology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai, and Jonathan Dordick, PhD, Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer, explain why this center is a big deal.

What is precision medicine?

Dr. Balchandani: With every patient being unique, diseases can sometimes occur differently across individuals. Precision medicine is a term meant to describe customized health care tailored to a specific group of patients. In order to do that, we need to apply new technologies engineered to understand causes of specific diseases and combine highly precise and sensitive physiological measurements to provide targeted treatment plans.

There are many areas in which precision medicine plays a big part. Cancer is one of them, as are various neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, where having precise tools to measure and integrate different types of patient data is crucial not just to the development of tailored treatment plans, but also for understanding disease mechanisms.

If [engineers] are at the table at every stage of research, they can figure out the best solutions rather than look for what exists out there.

Dr. Jonathan Dordick

Co-Director of CEPM; Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

How have precision medicine and engineering developed in the past?

Dr. Dordick: I wouldn’t say they were siloed, but advancements in either field have sometimes developed alongside each other, or on top of each other, rather than being fully integrated.

For example, devising a therapeutic at a broad level is a traditional path toward patient treatment, but then what are the ways and tools needed to individualize the treatment for an individual patient? How do we scale those methods? Engineering brings in infrastructure, such as using modeling or simulations, as well as broad systems-level expertise that can sometimes help answer those questions.

But there hadn’t really been a case where engineers and biomedical researchers got together to ask those questions from the get-go and figure out what tools might be needed. If they are at the table at every stage of research, they can figure out the best solutions rather than look for what exists out there.

What sort of innovation might this center enable?

Dr. Balchandani: Types of innovations include devices, algorithms, methods, and therapeutics to improve diagnosis, treatment, and surgical care of a wide range of diseases, including neurodegenerative disease, infectious diseases, and cancer.

There will be a mix of basic science and translational work. For example, the basic science work may be focused on revealing disease causes or mechanisms in order to drive new treatments. These preliminary clinical trials are important to establish safety and eventually help treatments receive regulatory approval.

Dr. Dordick: A co-located center in New York City primes us to answer pressing questions. Take COVID-19, for example: Why did some people develop severe disease while others didn’t? What are the mechanisms that lead to long COVID? Through the combined expertise of Rensselaer and Mount Sinai, we hope to learn answers at an individual level about this pandemic, which will make us better prepared for future crises.

I also envision us making strides in improving current therapeutics. Can we devise less invasive techniques for certain treatments? Can we better grow tissue that reduces the risk of rejection? Rensselaer is not a medical school, and through this partnership we’ll be able to know what are the right questions to ask.

Read more about what the new Center will focus on and its future plans

Our hope is that they will be designed with the intention of being tested in clinical trials immediately after development.

Dr. Priti Balchandani

Co-Director of CEPM; Professor of Diagnostic, Molecular and Interventional Radiology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai

How soon can these innovations reach patients?

Dr. Balchandani: Our hope is that they will be designed with the intention of being tested in clinical trials immediately after development. We will also work with commercial partners to manufacture and deploy the inventions to patients as quickly as possible. We will create a “development lab” within the Center to facilitate this.

New Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine Paves the Way for Two Fields to Work More Closely Together

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Research, School

Shirley Ann Jackson, PhD, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Eric Nestler, MD, PhD, Director of The Friedman Brain Institute, and Andrew Kimball, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, sign a ceremonial agreement at the launch of the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine.

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on May 12 announced the opening of the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM), forming a new venture to bridge engineering and biomedical science expertise between the two organizations.

The center, located at 619 West 54th Street in Manhattan, focuses on three research areas—neuroengineering, immunoengineering, and regenerative and reparative medicine. Its footprint includes spaces for wet and dry laboratories, as well as offices for faculty and researchers.

In addition to research, CEPM will develop a joint PhD in engineering and precision medicine, and ultimately master’s degrees and certificate programs. Enrollment could occur as early as the fall of 2023, said Jonathan Dordick, PhD, Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer and Co-Director of the Center.

The Center is the latest development borne from a partnership between Mount Sinai and Rensselaer—dating to 2013—that has secured more than $70 million in shared research funding. Milestone achievements have included an artificial pancreas system developed by the two institutions and a number of advances in improving treatment and health infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We identified that there was a need in New York City and the state for such a collaboration to be the foundation of a new path of innovation between engineering and precision medicine,” said Priti Balchandani, PhD, Professor of Diagnostic, Molecular and Interventional Radiology, Neuroscience, and Psychiatry at Icahn Mount Sinai and Co-Director of the Center.

FAST FACTS

Project planned since: 2018
Footprint: 14,000 usable square feet
Faculty size: Mount Sinai and Rensselaer jointly hope to recruit 20 faculty members within five years for the center
Planned academic programs: PhD in Engineering and Precision Medicine jointly awarded by Mount Sinai and Rensselaer, master’s programs, and certificate programs in entrepreneurship and other areas relevant to advanced education at the interface of medicine and engineering.

The creation of the Center sets the stage for engineers to consider the needs of biomedical researchers to develop tools, systems, and infrastructure needed to address unanswered questions, Dr. Dordick said. “As a field, we’ve been asking how engineering can play a closer role at each stage of development in biomedical science from bench to bedside.”

Read a Q&A from the leaders of the new Center on how bridging engineering and precision medicine can benefit patients

The Center will also serve as a hub for industry partners and collaborators. Its “Development Labs” will be working with Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, the team focused on commercializing innovations from Mount Sinai Health System, on technology transfers with industry partners, as well as fostering the creation of startups, Dr. Balchandani said.

“This partnership with Rensselaer is truly a first where not only are two organizations coming together for research and academic excellence,” she noted, “it is also creating a partnership that will augment translational work in the city.”

Mount Sinai is also growing its presence in the area by building laboratory spaces in a facility on 11th Avenue, adjacent to the Center, for the Mount Sinai West campus.

“Ultimately, the goal is to develop new innovations that will benefit patients,” Dr. Dordick said. “The work at the Center cannot start soon enough.”

SARS-CoV-2: Three Leading Microbiologists Discuss the Path Forward

Mar 8, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Research

From left: Florian Krammer, PhD, Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, and Peter Palese, PhD

Microbiologists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who created the first and most reliable test to determine whether an individual has antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, have been monitoring the virus since it began circulating in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

Now, Peter Palese, PhD, Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology, and Florian Krammer, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor in Vaccinology— weigh in on the future of SARS-CoV-2 and its place in our lives. They, and their colleague, Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Professor of Medicine, recently created a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine that can be manufactured wherever influenza vaccines are made—particularly in low-and-middle-income countries. The scientists are also working on a universal flu vaccine, which would confer immunity without having to be administered annually.

As we move away from this pandemic will SARS-CoV-2 continue to play a large part in our lives?

Dr. Palese: Clearly the future is difficult to predict, but one likely scenario would be similar to the way we manage influenza viruses, which necessitates continuing vaccinations as we go into the future—perhaps once a year or once every two years. In this case, the virus continually changes but the effects can be ameliorated by vaccines, and those vaccines have to be changed. But they reduce fatality and hospitalization and the need for people to stay home.

Dr. Krammer: In this scenario the virus is not going to disappear. It’s just going to stick around and become the fifth coronavirus that circulates in humans. The other four coronaviruses make up about 30 percent of all common colds, and they’re seasonal; they come in the winter like influenza.

Dr. García-Sastre: Some of these common coronaviruses that cause the common cold have been with us for a long time and are very different from SARS-CoV-2. They are happily living with us, rarely cause any major disease, and do not cause a threat.

Dr. Krammer: Now, influenza typically causes more damage than these common coronaviruses which are typically causing mild infection, except in people who have problems with their immune system who are sometimes brought to the intensive care unit. I think SARS-CoV-2 will land somewhere between influenza and human coronaviruses—between those two extremes.

Is it possible that this virus will simply disappear?

Dr. Palese: You can never exclude the possibility that this virus will peter out the way the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) did twenty years ago, when it emerged to cause some really high fatalities but disappeared. On the one hand it was a nightmare, but then it was over.

Dr. Krammer: I don’t think the virus will just disappear, but it might. We didn’t think there would be so many variants this quickly, especially not something like Omicron, so there might be surprises. I hope for society’s sake that this fades into the background and we’re not afraid every fall that another wave is coming. The scenario I would like to see in six months is that Peter and I – as virologists – are concerned about it but that the problem is insignificant enough so that the public does not have to be. We’ll see if that happens.

How do we continue to ensure protection from COVID-19?

Dr. Krammer: We have to look at the baseline immunity that exists in the population. If a lot of people have immunity and there is less virus circulating chances are that you either don’t get infected or, if you get infected, your immunity will be protect you against severe outcomes. Then the disease and infections become less relevant. And that is what we hope for. Now, you can get there through vaccinations—that’s the painless way, or you can get there by having had the infections, and that’s the painful way. But both contribute to having higher baseline immunity in the population. Unfortunately, even in this scenario, immunocompromised patients are still at risk of severe outcomes although there risk of getting infected is lower.

Dr. García-Sastre: Vaccinations are still the solution to the problem. We should make sure that as many people as possible are vaccinated and boosted.

Dr. Krammer: I think we need to keep working on vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. Right now we have this situation where the vaccine protects very well against severe disease if you’re not immune compromised. But those vaccines are not protecting very well from infection anymore. They did against the original virus, but not with the variants. That’s why, for example, we need a variant-specific vaccine for Omicron. There are ways to make vaccines differently so you get more sterilizing immunity, which would suppress infections more, in general, and that would make the world safer for those who don’t mount good immune responses.

Dr. Palese: In creating our COVID-19 vaccine at Mount Sinai, we are using the Newcastle-disease virus in a vector-driven approach. If the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] is agreeable and allows the comprehensive use of genetically modified viruses, such as ours, then we can prevent the emergence of these new variants by vaccinating right away with the correct vaccine against the new variant, and we should be in good shape.

Do you think the public needs a fourth vaccine right now?

Dr. Krammer: For populations that don’t mount optimal responses or their responses disappear quickly, there might be an advantage in getting another dose. But for the general population, I don’t think this is useful right now. If there is a fourth dose, it should be variant-specific, an adapted vaccine that reflects what’s circulating right now.

For immunocompromised individuals, there are already a couple of important therapeutic treatments—including PAXLOVID from Pfizer Inc., operating under the FDA’s emergency use authorization—that can help them to greatly reduce their risk of a severe outcome.

Is it feasible to create a universal coronavirus vaccine—similar to the universal influenza vaccine you are developing?

Dr. Krammer: By universal you mean a variant-proof SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, I assume? One that would protect against all variants? We’ve made a lot of progress with the universal influenza vaccine in the last few years. But vaccine development has just started for coronaviruses and there are a lot of approaches out there. Coronaviruses are very diverse. A truly universal coronavirus vaccine would include protection against SARS-CoV-1 and other viruses in that subgenus and then you have a bigger genus of betacoronaviruses and, in addition, you have alpha-, delta-, and gammacoronaviruses (meant are the coronavirus genera, not the SARS-CoV-2 variants). So developing a universal coronavirus vaccine that would protect against all of them is a very big ask. It might be possible at some point, but it is small steps now and would take a lot of time. Of course, something that protects against variants that are around now or could be developed within the next five years, that’s actually possible.