Erik Lium, PhD, Executive Vice President, Mount Sinai Innovation Partners, left, presents the Mount Sinai Inventor of the Year Award to Steven J. Burakoff, MD.

Individuals and teams from the Mount Sinai Health System were honored for significant advances in biomedical research, technology, and medicine at the eighth annual Mount Sinai Innovation Awards ceremony held Monday, October 24.

Through the dedication of presenters, participants, attendees, and event organizers, the Innovation Awards showcase and inspire ingenuity and advances in research, technology, medicine, and health care.

Steven J. Burakoff, MD, Dean for Cancer Innovation and Lillian and Henry M. Stratton Professor of Cancer Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, received the Mount Sinai Inventor of the Year Award for developing small molecule therapeutic inhibitors targeting HPK1 to regulate the immune response against cancer. This technology entered phase 1 clinical trials in spring 2022. The award recognizes individual or collaborative investigators in the Mount Sinai Health System whose research is making, or has the potential to make, significant positive and product-driven impacts on health.

The Mount Sinai Transaction of the Year Award was given to Manish Arora, PhD, BDS, MPH, Professor and Vice Chairman; Christine Austin, PhD, Associate Professor; and Paul Curtin, PhD, Associate Professor, all at the Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health. They are co-founders of Linus Biotechnology, which aims to develop and commercialize a novel precision exposome sequencing platform for complex diseases. The company received Breakthrough Device designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for StrandDx™-ASD, a diagnostic aid for autism spectrum disorder. The award recognizes a notable technology from the Mount Sinai Health System that represents a major breakthrough in research and a strong commercial partnership for advancement,

The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Robert J. Desnick, MD, PhD, Chair Emeritus and Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, whose research led to the development of Fabrazyme® and GIVLAARI®, drugs for treating lysosomal storage disease. He co-founded Amicus Therapeutics, a company that aims to develop and deliver medicines for rare metabolic conditions, including olipudase alfa.

Scott Friedman, MD, Dean for Therapeutic Discovery, served as host of the event.

The Mount Sinai Pitch Challenge Award was given to Tyree Williams, MEng, a biomedical engineering doctoral researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a visiting graduate student researcher at Sinai BioDesign.  He is the founder of Kratos Orthopedics, which is developing a novel mortar bone cement system to improve mechanical responses and post-operative care in patients who have undergone spinal surgeries. The award is the capstone event for Mount Sinai Innovation Partner’s Entrepreneurship Program, where finalists compete for a cash prize and pro-bono services to continue the development of health care solutions.

The Faculty Idea Prize was given to Sairam Geethanath, PhD, Assistant Professor, Diagnostic, Molecular and Interventional Radiology, and Shilpa R. Taufique, PhD, Assistant Professor, Psychiatry, for their work on substance use disorders, which affect brain health, especially in underserved populations, due to inequitable health care access. The award aims to support a collaborative, innovative, research idea by junior faculty that can potentially be translated into a marketable product through the development of therapeutics, devices, diagnostics, digital health applications, and/or data driven educational or community-based interventions.

The KiiLN Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Award was given to Joon Ho Seo, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow, and SmartMazes, LLC. This project is focused on designing and manufacturing economical, modular, and modifiable rodent behavioral apparatuses that can serve as multiple mazes for the purpose of basic and translational neuroscience. The award is designed to highlight entrepreneurial endeavors of Mount Sinai postdoctoral fellows who co-found or lead companies by advancing their discoveries beyond the bench to create diagnostics, devices, and therapeutic products or by applying other solutions, in order to address unmet needs in life sciences.

The i3 Prism Award was given to Benjamin Rodriguez, a medical student, and Maddison Archer and Emelie Lassen, PhD, both postdoctoral fellows. The Mount Sinai i3 Prism technology commercialization fund aims to bring new health care solutions to patients and society by advancing technologies from women and Black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) inventors closer to the marketplace.

The i3 Genesis Award aims to translate Mount Sinai discoveries in various health care fields with clear potential for commercialization and defined technology or data gaps that can be addressed with funding. It was given to six teams for 2022 and five teams for 2021. The 2022 recipients are:

• Daniela Sia, PhD, Anna Tocheva, PhD, Elliot Merritt, PhD, and Emily Bramel
• Isabella Morgan, Joshua Bederson, MD, Mitch Baldwin, and Benjamin Rapoport, MD
• Weijia Zhang, PhD, Stephen Ward, MD, Fasika Tedla, MD, Zhengzi Yi, MSc, and Caixia Xi, MSc
• Yulia Landa, PsyD, MS, and Rachel Jespersen, MSW
• Kara Bagot, MD, Angela Diaz, MD, and Anne Nucci, MD
• Margaret Brandwein, MD, and Mark Urken, MD

The 2021 recipients are:

• Alfred-Marc Iloreta, MD, Turner Baker, PhD, Alexis Bruhat, MEng, and Benjamin Rapoport, MD
• Jonathan DePierro, PhD, Laurel Morris, PhD, James Murrough, MD, PhD, Dennis Charney, MD, and Adriana Feder, MD
• Mark Rea, PhD, and Bridget Bradley
• Evren Azeloglu, PhD, Eric Lima, PhD, Alan Benvenisty, MD, Kirk Campbell, MD, and Jacob Wright
• Gautam Kamthan, MD, and Sean Ianchulev, MD

The winners who attended the event held in Davis Auditorium in the Leon and Norma Hess Center for Science and Medicine on the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai campus.

The Diversity Innovation Hub Innovator Prize was given to Tanvir Islam, founder and CEO of TYCA, who has been supporting the growth of local economies and accessibility of resources within communities.

The Diversity Innovation Hub Founders Award was given to Gil Addo, MBA, cofounder and CEO of RubiconMD, who has been transforming the delivery of digital health through making specialty consults more accessible to all populations.

The THRIVE Fellowship Award was given to these teams:

• Spinovations: Tyree Williams, MEng, Ian Odland, BS, Eugene Hrabarchuck, BA, Zaara Irshad, MHA, and Janvi Patel, BA (mentor: Tanvir Choudhri, MD). Spinovations is working on developing a new spinal screwdriver for more patient-centered, minimally invasive surgeries.
• ai: Faris Gulamali, BS (mentor: Neha Dangayach, MD). They are focusing on the problem of monitoring intracranial pressure.

• Metaphor: Hyomin Seo, BEng, and Brian Soong, BA (mentors: Towfique Raj, PhD, John Doucette, PhD, and Emma Benn, DrPH). Metaphor is working on an AI-based project to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease in the speech patterns of non-English speakers.

• SSI Detection: Jenny Chen, BS, Nasseef Quasim, MDc, Sushruta Iruvanti, BA, Vivian Utti, BS, and Vivek Prakash, MD. They are working on a system to detect early signs of surgical site infection following vascular surgery procedures, using a combination of clinical biomarkers and remote visualization/monitoring technologies.

The Trainee Innovation Idea Award was given to these individuals:

• MD and MD/PhD Students: Randal A. Serafini, MS, Justin J. Frere, BS, Venetia Zachariou, PhD, and Benjamin R. TenOever, PhD, for developing a pre-clinical hamster model of long COVID for enhanced therapeutic development.

• PhD Students: Pushkala Jayaraman, MS, Justin Kauffman, BS, and Girish Nadkarni, MD, MPH, for work on AI and electronic health records.

• Postdoctoral Fellows: Wontack Han, PhD, Ryan Walker, PhD, Jeremiah Faith, PhD, and Maia Kayal, PhD, for identifying gut microbiome metagenomic features to develop a clinical prediction tool for inflammatory bowel disease.

• House staff: Harry Anastos, MD, for utilizing the expression of immune checkpoint proteins in the peripheral blood of patients with elevated prostatic specific antigen (PSA) to predict the presence of prostate cancer.

The Mount Sinai Innovation Awards hosts are: The office of the Dean; Mount Sinai Innovation Partners; the Office of Faculty Development; the Office for Diversity and Inclusion; the Keystone for Incubating Innovation in Life Sciences Network (KiiLN); ConduITS-Institute for Translational Sciences; Sinai BioDesign; the Department of Medical Education; the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the Graduate Medical Education Office; and the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.

Louise Malle, MD/PhD candidate, and Dusan Bogunovic, PhD

In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread through New York City, Louise Malle, an MD/PhD candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, turned her focus to the disturbing statistics coming out on disease severity. She thought the data might inform her research to better understand immunity in people with Down syndrome.

Louise Malle, MD/PhD candidate

Ms. Malle, who works in the lab of Dusan Bogunovic, PhD,  surveyed thousands of patients diagnosed with COVID-19, and essentially found that individuals with the syndrome have about 10 times the likelihood of having extremely severe disease.

Dr. Bogunovic is Professor at the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute, The Mindich Child Health and Development Institute, the Icahn Genomics Institute, and the departments of Oncological Sciences, Microbiology, Pediatrics, and Dermatology, as well as a Director of the Center for Inborn Errors of Immunity—all at Icahn Mount Sinai.

It turns out that Ms. Malle’s epidemiological observation added to a body of literature that suggests that severe viral disease is a problem in Down syndrome. The work led to new findings, published online on October 14, 2022 in the journal Immunity, showing that people with Down syndrome have less frequent but more severe viral infections.

“As we all were caught in the COVID-19 pandemic, Louise saw what was going on in the clinic in people with Down syndrome (based on her review of hospital records),” said Dr. Bogunovic, senior study author. “She saw what was going on in the world and then came to the lab, ultimately figuring out, at least in part, why this understudied and underserved population experiences more severe viral infections across the board.”

According to the study, this phenomenon is caused by increased expression of genes that sense an antiviral cytokine, type I interferon (IFN-I), as they are encoded on chromosome 21. Elevated sensing of IFN-I lead to hyperactivity of the immune response initially, but the body overcorrects for this to reduce inflammation, leading to increased vulnerability later in the viral attack.

Dusan Bogunovic, PhD

“Usually too much inflammation means autoimmune disease, and immune suppression usually means susceptibility to infections,” says Dr. Bogunovic. “What is unusual is that individuals with Down syndrome are both inflamed and immunosuppressed, a paradox of sorts. Here, we discovered how this is possible.”

Down syndrome is typically caused by triplication of chromosome 21. The syndrome affects multiple organ systems, causing a mixed clinical presentation that includes varying degrees of intellectual disability, developmental delays, congenital heart and gastrointestinal abnormalities, and Alzheimer’s disease in older individuals. It is universally present across racial, gender, or socioeconomic lines in approximately 1 in 800 live births, although there is considerable variation worldwide.

Recently, it has become clear that atypical antiviral responses are another important feature of Down syndrome. Increased rates of hospitalization of people with the genetic disorder have been documented for influenza A virus, respiratory syncytial virus, and severe acute respiratory syndrome due to coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infections, according to the researchers.

“We have a lot more to do to completely understand the complexities of the immune system in Down syndrome,” said Ms. Malle, first author of the study. “We have here, in part, explained the susceptibility to severe viral disease, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Barcelona, Spain

In a milestone in cardiovascular medicine, a  three-drug medication known as a “polypill” was found effective in preventing adverse events such as heart attacks or stroke in people who have previously had a heart attack, reducing cardiovascular mortality by 33 percent in this patient population. These are findings from the SECURE trial led by Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, Director of Mount Sinai Heart and Physician-in-Chief of The Mount Sinai Hospital.

The study results were announced on Friday, August 26, at the European Society of Cardiology Congress (ESC 2022) in Barcelona, Spain, and published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“The results of the SECURE study show that for the first time that the polypill, which contains aspirin, ramipril, and atorvastatin, achieves clinically relevant reductions in the recurrent cardiovascular events among people who have recovered from a previous heart attack because of better adherence to this simplified approach with a simple polypill, rather than taking them separately as conventional,” says Dr. Fuster, General Director of the Spanish National Center for Cardiovascular Research (CNIC), which developed the polypill.

Patients recovering from a heart attack—also known as myocardial infarction—are prescribed specific treatments to prevent subsequent cardiovascular events. Standard therapy includes three different drugs: an antiplatelet agent (like aspirin); ramipril or a similar drug to control blood pressure; and a lipid-reducing drug, such as a statin. However, fewer than 50 percent of patients consistently adhere to their medication regimen.

“Although most patients initially adhere to treatment after an acute event such as an infarction, adherence drops off after the first few months. Our goal was to have an impact right from the start, and most of the patients in the study began taking a simple polypill in the first week after having a heart attack,” Dr. Fuster explains.

“Adherence to treatment after an acute myocardial infarction is essential for effective secondary prevention,” says José María Castellano, MD, study first author and Scientific Director of Fundación de Investigación HM Hospitales.

The concept of a polypill for cardiovascular disease prevention was proposed in 2003 and widely debated among experts, with some arguing that it could reduce heart disease at a population level and others arguing that patients could wrongly consider it as a substitute for healthy lifestyles. In 2007, the potential value of applying the polypill strategy in high-risk patients was recognized by the WHO and the World Heart Federation, and Dr. Fuster authored a call to action in Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine,  “A polypill for secondary prevention: time to move from intellectual debate to action.”

Scientists at the CNIC, in partnership with FERRER laboratories, developed a polypill and have conducted a range of studies over the intervening years. CNIC scientists first demonstrated that prescription of the CNIC polypill significantly improved treatment adherence among patients recovering after a myocardial infarction, in the FOCUS study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).

The CNIC team launched the SECURE study, an international randomized clinical trial, to determine whether the improved treatment adherence with the polypill translated into a reduction in cardiovascular events. The polypill analyzed in the study, commercialized under the name Trinomia, contains aspirin (100 mg), the angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor ramipril (2.5, 5, or 10 mg), and atorvastatin (20 or 40 mg).

SECURE included 2,499 patients from seven European countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Poland, and Hungary) recovering after a heart attack. Study participants were randomly assigned to receive standard therapy or the CNIC polypill. The average age of the participants was 76 years, and 31 percent were women. The study population included 77.9 percent with hypertension, 57.4 percent with diabetes, and 51.3 percent with a history of smoking tobacco.

Researchers analyzed the incidence of four major cardiovascular events: death from cardiovascular causes, non-fatal myocardial infarction, non-fatal stroke, and need for emergency coronary revascularization (the restoration of blood flow through a blocked coronary artery). The study followed patients for an average of three years and produced conclusive results: patients taking the CNIC polypills had a 24 percent lower risk of these four events than patients taking the three separate drugs.

The standout finding of the study is the effect of the polypill on the key outcome of cardiovascular-related death, which showed a relative reduction of 33 percent, from 71 patients in the group receiving standard treatment to just 48 in the polypill group. Importantly, the study found that patients in the polypill group had a higher level of treatment adherence than those in the control group, thus confirming the findings of the earlier FOCUS study, and in part such good adherence appears to explain the benefits of the simple polypill.

“The SECURE study findings suggest that the polypill could become an integral element of strategies to prevent recurrent cardiovascular events in patients who have had a heart attack,” Dr. Fuster says. “By simplifying treatment and improving adherence, this approach has the potential to reduce the risk of recurrent cardiovascular disease and death on a global scale.”