The National Eye Institute (NEI), a division of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai a five-year grant to support an effort to recreate a patient’s ocular stem cells and restore vision in those blinded by corneal disease. (more…)
“We have learned that the impossible is possible, and advances are being made that we could not have imagined just a few years ago,” said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, at the conclusion of the school’s third annual SinaInnovations conference in November.
The conference, which took place on campus Tuesday and Wednesday, November 18 and 19, respectively, focused on breakthroughs in medicine and engineering that improve human health and was sponsored jointly with Mount Sinai’s academic affiliate Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have received more than $31 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create three new centers that will study how drugs interact with human cells to increase their effectiveness and decrease side effects.
A new Drug Toxicity Signature Center will be run by Ravi Iyengar, PhD, Dorothy H. and Lewis Rosenstiel Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, who has received a grant totaling $11.6 million from the NIH. By leveraging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System database, the center will develop cell signatures that can be used to predict the effects of certain drugs and drug combinations.
Developing new drugs for the treatment of sarcoidosis isn’t easy. First, the cause of sarcoidosis is unknown. Second, prednisone, a remarkably effective medication for the treatment of sarcoidosis, limited only by its adverse side effect profile, is tough to beat. Third, sarcoidosis is a rare disease, which affects fewer than 200,000 people in the US per year. These challenges notwithstanding, researchers at Mount Sinai will be testing a new drug for the treatment of sarcoidosis. In late 2015, the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine will be enrolling sarcoidosis patients, who meet prespecified entry criteria, into a clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of KiactaTM for the treatment of sarcoidosis.
Abnormalities in the structure and function of the brain can appear in people who are overweight, smoke, have diabetes, hypertension, elevated lipids, or metabolic syndrome before the other consequences of vascular risk factors—such as a heart attack or stroke—appear, according to a team of researchers at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
A pioneering study now under way at the Mount Sinai Health System’s Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute is exploring why older patients often wake up from surgery disoriented and some experience cognitive deficits several months later. The study is being led at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with $3.1 million in funding from The National Institute on Aging.