Students Present Their Latest Studies at Medical Student Research Day

Mar 30, 2021 | Featured, Research

One hundred six poster presentations and four oral presentations capped off new research that was conducted by students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and featured at Mount Sinai’s Fourth Annual Karen Zier, PhD, Medical Student Research Day, held over Zoom in March.

Participating in Research Day fulfills one of the medical school’s graduation requirements. Eighty percent of the presenters each year are in their second year of medical school.

“Medical Student Research Day is a showcase and an opportunity for students to share the research and scholarship they have done with their mentors with the Mount Sinai community,” says Mary Rojas, PhD, Director of Icahn Mount Sinai’s Medical Student Research Office, and Associate Professor of Medical Education. “It is an early snapshot of the students’ accomplishments.”

Dr. Rojas says that by the time they graduate, more than half of Mount Sinai’s students will have published in peer-reviewed journals. The Class of 2021 has already published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles.

The event exemplifies Mount Sinai’s commitment to fostering biomedical research and introduces students to the intellectual rigors, skills, and collaboration that lead to incremental findings and life-changing discoveries.

Under the mentorship of Tanvir Choudhri, MD, Associate Professor of Neurosurgery, at Icahn Mount Sinai, second-year student Zachary Spiera found that the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs), which diminish inflammation, does not make users more susceptible to concussions and does not worsen their outcomes. This was a subject he had wondered about because he and his teammates had plied themselves with NSAIDs while playing basketball and soccer in high school and middle school.

Before launching his own research, Mr. Spiera searched through medical literature, but could not find an answer. “As a student you look up to the medical community and think there are going to be answers to your questions,” he says. “Then you see something that hasn’t been figured out yet.” He is first author on a study about this subject that was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics.

 

This spring, Jordyn Feingold will receive a joint MD and Master of Science in Clinical Research, before continuing at Mount Sinai for her residency in Psychiatry. At Research Day, she presented her work on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on 2,579 front-line health care workers at The Mount Sinai Hospital. She and her mentor, Jonathan Ripp, MD, MPH, Dean for Well-being and Resilience and Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine, and Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine) recently published their findings in the journal Chronic Stress.

One of the study’s key takeaways, Ms. Feingold says, was the high prevalence—39 percent—of COVID-19-related post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder that existed among the hospital’s front-line health care workers at the peak of the pandemic last year. The “greatest driver of those symptoms was being burned out, which is significant,” she says, “because it was happening well before COVID-19 and it is something that can be addressed.” Her research also found “the greatest modifiable protective factor was feeling supported by hospital leadership.”

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a springboard for student research by others, including second-year students Cynthia Luo, Alexander Kalicki, and Kate Moody, who also presented abstracts of their studies on Research Day.

Ms. Luo studied resilience among her fellow medical students during the pandemic under the mentorship of Craig Katz, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Global Health, and Medical Education, at Icahn Mount Sinai. She divided students into two groups: those who responded to a survey by saying the COVID-19 pandemic had been their most traumatic life event, and those who responded by saying they had experienced earlier life traumas, such as the loss or illness of a loved one. Ms. Luo then measured their responses on a resilience scale that was created at Mount Sinai. “Students who indicated a non-COVID-19 impactful life event had significantly higher resilience than those who indicated COVID-19,” says Ms. Luo. “To me that demonstrates that having prior stressful life experiences was, in some ways, protective for managing COVID stress. Potentially, these experiences helped students grow and develop their resilience behaviors before COVID-19.” Ms. Luo plans to finish compiling her research and submitting it for publication in the coming months.

 

Mr. Kalicki and Ms. Moody are co-authors on a study that was just accepted by the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS), which examined the barriers to video-based telehealth access that older homebound adults faced during the pandemic. Mr. Kalicki worked as a software engineer before entering medical school and says his passion for using technology to improve health care delivery led him to pursue the project under the mentorship of Peter Gliatto, MD, Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine), Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, and Medical Education at Icahn Mount Sinai. Katherine Ornstein, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor, Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, also served as the students’ mentor.

Ms. Moody says she was drawn to the subjects of process improvement and providing a high level of health care to a population that is difficult to access. Both students helped design a survey that was completed by physicians in the Mount Sinai Visiting Doctors Program and conducted the data analysis for the study. They also created a data collection sheet for Mount Sinai’s Epic electronic health record system to systematically record information about patients’ previous telehealth use, as well as structural barriers patients may face, such as access to the internet or the capacity to pay for cellular data. The students hope that a better understanding of these barriers will help inform future interventions that are designed to reach patients with limited access to care.

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Artificial Intelligence Tools May Detect Abnormalities that Could Otherwise Be Missed

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

Mount Sinai radiologists are comparing machine-read patient discharge summaries with original, human-read reports.

A patient’s electronic health record typically contains a trove of information that can be used to help predict and manage their future health needs. But much of that information is often composed of unstructured or fragmented data that first must be translated into language that physicians are able to understand.

A new partnership between the Mount Sinai Health System’s Department of Radiology and an Israel-based start-up, Maverick Medical AI, is exploring how to accomplish that task through the use of artificial intelligence. In a proof-of-concept study, Maverick’s deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are being used to accurately identify co-morbidities in 1.5 million patient discharge summaries and radiology reports. If it is successful, Maverick’s program could open the door for its use in an array of medical, research, and business opportunities at Mount Sinai.

David Mendelson, MD

David Mendelson, MD, Vice Chair of Radiology Information Technology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is playing a key role in the research. He says one of Maverick’s strengths is its ability to report on secondary abnormalities in nearby organ systems that are sometimes only partially seen or could possibly be overlooked in radiological screenings.

“If someone is screened for lung cancer and the findings are negative, that’s great news for the patient,” says Dr. Mendelson. “But if natural language processing could identify secondary indications like coronary artery calcification or abnormal density of the liver, which might suggest non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, that information could prove very useful to physicians and patients. Physicians might be able to take preventive steps to improve outcomes for patients and ultimately lower health care costs downstream.”

Determining whether Maverick’s propriety algorithm can provide that important information is the responsibility of Pamela Argiriadi, MD, Assistant Professor of Diagnostic, Molecular and Interventional Radiology at Mount Sinai. Dr. Argiriadi and a team of residents are spot-checking secondary co-morbidities extracted by the algorithm from an ocean of radiology reports and discharge summaries to determine how they compare to the original, human-read reports.

“Radiology reports contain a wealth of information and we hope our study will shed light on how key-word phrases in those documents can be mined to provide input into the well-being of patients,” Dr. Argiriadi says. “A major goal of ours is to improve communication with primary care providers by reporting secondary findings to them, which can result in follow-up treatment and preventive medicine.” The software can recognize these findings within the report, extract them, and flag them for the provider.

Yossi Shahak, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Maverick Medical AI, estimates that as much as 80 percent of a patient’s health information remains untapped due to its unstructured format. Translating that raw, fragmented data into medical coding language would provide physicians with actionable clinical insights.

“We are starting with radiology and hope to expand the vocabularies across many medical subspecialties, like cardiology and gastroenterology,” says Mr. Shahak. “That expansion of our data sets could provide Mount Sinai physicians with significant value when they mine it for often overlooked chronic conditions and risk factors. In addition, the conversion from unstructured data into medical coding will help Mount Sinai improve their financial capabilities.”

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Young, Asymptomatic People Can Get Reinfected With COVID-19 and Spread it More Than Once, Study Shows

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Research

A prospective study of 3,249 Marine recruits—who were mostly male and between the ages of 18 and 20—shows a significant risk of reinfection among those who have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19.

The study, posted on MedRxiv, was led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai working with the Naval Medical Research Center. It found that the risk of reinfection in those with antibodies was 18 percent of the risk of infection in those without antibodies. Most of the reinfected Marines were asymptomatic, and none required hospitalization. The infections were detected by PCR tests.

The findings support the importance of vaccinating all segments of the population, including individuals who have SARS-CoV-2 antibodies but were never actually diagnosed with COVID-19, and those who were diagnosed, recovered, and think they are now safe from another infection. The study also points to the fact that young people, who are typically asymptomatic, may unknowingly spread the disease to others more than once.

“It is important that we don’t neglect this college-age group of the population,” says the study’s lead author, Stuart Sealfon, MD, the Sara B. and Seth M. Glickenhaus Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics at Icahn Mount Sinai. “They are such an important group in spreading the disease. Many young people have this ‘get it and get over it mentality’ and unfortunately they still have a surprisingly high risk of recontracting it and possibly spreading the virus to others.”

The six-week study was highly controlled. It involved two separate periods of quarantine and multiple tests for COVID-19 before the recruits entered basic training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, in South Carolina. The study found that among those with antibodies, the reinfected individuals had lower antibody levels and more often lacked detectable levels of the virus-neutralizing antibody activity that blocks infection.

According to Dr. Sealfon, the findings should help resolve any concerns over whether people who have already had COVID-19 should receive the vaccine, particularly in light of current vaccine shortages.

Stuart Sealfon, MD,

“That’s an important take-home message,” says Dr. Sealfon. “Certainly we can show from this study that there’s a fairly high risk of reinfection and not everybody who has had infection will generate effective immunity. So you really want to vaccinate everyone and not worry if they’ve had it or not.”

Why some people fail to generate persistent immunity against reinfection from COVID-19 remains unknown. But highly variable responses to any disease are actually beneficial for evolution.

“When a new disease shows up, individual immune responses are variable to ensure survival at a population level,” says Dr. Sealfon. “People have different genetics that make up their immune systems. They have different previous exposure histories that train the immune system in how to respond to new infections. Immunity uses combinatorial systems to hedge its bets to try and generate the best response it can within an individual and to vary what’s happening across individuals. As a result of individual differences, some people generate more effective long-term immune responses than others.”

In the November 11, 2020, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Sealfon published an earlier study of these marine recruits during their initial supervised quarantine period. He showed that strict public health measures including wearing face masks, social distancing, hand washing, and widespread testing did not completely suppress transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

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Researchers Identify a Promising New Antiviral Drug to Treat COVID-19

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Research

Plitidepsin is derived from Aplidium albicans, a marine organism that typically attaches itself to hard surfaces, such as reefs.

The search for better medical treatments for COVID-19 has led a team of scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with colleagues in San Francisco, to plitidepsin—a promising small molecule drug derived from a sea organism. When tested in human lung cells, plitidepsin was particularly effective in stopping the replication of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. In fact, in pre-clinical trials, plitidepsin was 28-fold more effective than remdesivir—the only antiviral drug currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Association (FDA) to treat COVID-19.

Kris M. White, PhD

The research team from Mount Sinai and the University of California at San Francisco recently published their work in Science, revealing one of the most promising efforts to date in identifying an already approved drug that could be successfully repurposed to fight COVID-19. Plitidepsin is approved in Australia—under the name Aplidin—as a treatment for multiple myeloma, a cancer that forms in a group of white blood cells.

One of plitidepsin’s strengths is that it inhibits eEF1A, a host protein within human cells that every variant of SARS-CoV-2 needs to survive. Viruses hijack a human’s cellular machinery in order to thrive and create more copies of themselves, but plitidepsin works by blocking an important pathway that would be used by SARS-CoV-2, its variants, and potentially other respiratory diseases such as respiratory syncytial virus and influenza. In a separate preliminary study in bioRxiv, the research team, and a group of colleagues in England, showed that plitidepsin was effective against b.1.1.7, the newly identified British variant of SARS-CoV-2.

“Aplidin is quite unique in its potency,” says one of the study’s corresponding authors, Kris M. White, PhD, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, and a member of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine. “It is likely going to be able to work against any variant of SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, including new pandemics that might happen in the future. eEF1A appears to be a broadly used protein for viruses because it has an important role in protein production, making it important for the host cell and also extremely important for the virus. Now we’re looking to test plitidepsin against these other viruses as well.”

Corresponding study author Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD, Professor of Microbiology and Director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine, says, “The ongoing pandemic created the immediate need for us to find antiviral therapeutics that could be moved into the clinic. This led us to screen clinically approved drugs with established data and safety profiles. We found that plitidepsin was a very promising therapeutic candidate.”

Adolfo García-Sastre, PhD

The decision to pursue plitidepsin resulted from research the team conducted last spring, when they identified 332 different host proteins that SARS-CoV-2 interacted with. The scientists looked to see which ones had FDA-approved drugs that targeted the host protein for cancer or other diseases and began following a trail that ultimately led them to Aplidin. Within a week after publishing their work in Nature, the researchers were contacted by PharmaMar, the drug’s small Madrid-based manufacturer.

In October, PharmaMar released the results of a phase 1,2 clinical trial of Aplidin for use against COVID-19, which showed the drug was safe and effective in helping hospitalized patients recover from the disease. By day seven after taking Aplidin, the patients’ viral load was reduced by 50 percent, and by day 15, viral load was reduced by 70 percent. More than 80 percent of patients had been discharged from the hospital on or before day 15.

The results of the clinical trial also confirmed the tolerability of Aplidin for patients with COVID-19. Tolerability had already been observed in studies of approximately 1,300 cancer patients who actually received higher doses of Aplidin than the COVID-19 patients. PharmaMar is currently establishing phase 3 clinical trials.

“The data has shown that it’s worth trying the drug in a phase 3 clinical trial,” says Dr. White. “There’s a good chance we might see efficacy and that it will be well tolerated by the patients at certain doses.” Like remdesivir, plitidepsin would be given intravenously in a hospital setting.

The researchers have proposed that the drug be tested for use alongside remdesivir and also dexamethasone, an anti-inflammatory authorized for use in severely ill COVID-19 patients. As with other antiviral drugs, plitidepsin would work only if given early in the disease cycle, in the active viral replication stage of COVID-19.

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Sixth Annual Mount Sinai Innovation Awards

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Community, COVID-19, Featured, Research

The Inventor of the Year team conducted research that led to diagnostic tests for antibodies to COVID-19. (Standing) Florian Krammer, PhD, PhD, Professor of Microbiology, left, and Carlos Cordon-Cardo, MD, PhD, Irene Heinz Given and John LaPorte Given Professor and Chair of Pathology, Molecular and Cell-Based Medicine. (Seated, from left) Daniel Stadlbauer, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow; Fatima Amanat, Graduate Assistant; Adolfo Firpo-Betancourt, MD, Professor of Pathology, Molecular and Cell Based Medicine; Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, Professor of Microbiology; Ania Wajnberg, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine; and Damodara Rao Mendu, PhD, Director of Chemistry Laboratories, Department of Pathology, Molecular and Cell-Based Medicine.

Individuals and teams from the Mount Sinai Health System were honored for advances in biomedical research, technology, and medicine at the sixth annual Mount Sinai Innovation Awards ceremony, a virtual event held Tuesday, December 8, 2020.

Mount Sinai Innovation Partners (MSIP) presented the award for Inventor of the Year to an eight-member team led by renowned virologists and pathologists, whose efforts led to the development of multiple diagnostic tests for the detection of antibodies against the COVID-19 spike protein—the principal target of neutralizing antibodies.

The Innovation Awards also honored winners of the Faculty Idea Prize, the 4D Technology Development Award; the KiiLN Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Award; and the Trainee Innovation Idea Award.

The event, which can be viewed here, was hosted by: SINAInnovations, MSIP, the Office of Faculty Development, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, the Department of Medical Education, the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, the Graduate Medical Education Office, and the Keystone for Incubating Innovation for Life Sciences Network (KiiLN).  

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Mount Sinai Researchers Describe Viral Sanctuaries in the Gastrointestinal Tract of COVID-19 Patients

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Research

A new study published in the journal Nature by researchers at Mount Sinai in collaboration with two other labs at Rockefeller University and co-investigators from the California Institute of Technology and Weill Cornell Medicine describes for the first time a persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in the intestines long after clinical resolution.

The study, entitled “Evolution of antibody immunity to SARS-Cov-2” and published online January 18, 2021, suggests that the memory B cell response to SARS-Cov-2 evolves between 1.3 and 6.2 months after infection in a manner that is consistent with antigen persistence.

Saurabh Mehandru, MD

The authors studied intestinal biopsies obtained from asymptomatic individuals four months after the onset of COVID-19.

Minami Tokuyama, a medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and other members of the Mehandru Lab at the School of Medicine discovered that SARS-CoV-2 antigens persisted in the lining cells (epithelium) of the intestines long after (3-4 months post infection) resolution of clinical symptoms. The presence of such sanctuary sites could potentially enable continued maturation of the antibody response as was independently discovered by the Nussenzweig Lab at Rockefeller University.

“This finding is significant because it suggests that the memory B cell response does not wane after six months, providing reassurance that those who have previously been infected with the virus will likely mount a vigorous response if they are exposed a second time,” says study author Saurabh Mehandru, MD, Associate Professor of Gastroenterology at the Icahn School of Medicine and Director of the Mehandru Lab.

“Additionally, the presence of viral sanctuaries within the body needs to be better understood in COVID-19 patients with chronic symptoms, or ‘long haulers,’ which could help in identifying novel opportunities for the treatment of this group of patients,” says Dr. Mehandru.

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