Helping to Establish Sustainable Health Care in Liberia

At the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, Liberia, health officials, doctors, residents, and medical students gathered for grand rounds on the importance of research that were presented by Mount Sinai’s OBGYN team.

At the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, Liberia, health officials, doctors, residents, and medical students gathered for grand rounds on the importance of research that were presented by Mount Sinai’s OBGYN team.

After suspending travel to Liberia during the largest outbreak of Ebola in history, faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai resumed their teaching trips to the West African country last fall, with renewed efforts to improve women’s health.

Led by Ann Marie Beddoe, MD, Assistant Professor, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science, members of the Mount Sinai community have undertaken several initiatives in Liberia since they began working there in 2008. They are helping to train the country’s first residents in obstetrics and gynecology and have applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health to help build a cancer center. They have also trained nurses to conduct human papillomavirus (HPV) screenings and counsel patients. (more…)

Big Data Tools Help Decipher Disease Progression

Big Data Tools Help Decipher Disease Progression

The MEGENA tool has 3D spheres that help uncover precise network clusters associated with disease progression.

Two new Big Data analysis tools that help pinpoint specific genes that are actively involved in disease progression were recently made available to the public by scientists in the Multiscale Network Modeling Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The team, led by Bin Zhang, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, published the pair of algorithm-based tools online in November 2015 in PLoS Computational Biology and in Scientific Reports, a Nature publication. The open-source tools are available to all researchers who wish to gain a better understanding of disease mechanisms in order to develop more effective drugs and create individualized treatments. (more…)

Mount Sinai Introduces New Genetic Screening Tests

The Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory’s Executive Director, Lisa Edelmann, PhD, left, and Director, Ruth Kornreich, PhD

The Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory’s Executive Director, Lisa Edelmann, PhD, left, and Director, Ruth Kornreich, PhD

The Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory in January introduced a new panel of comprehensive pan-ethnic carrier screening tests for 281 genetic disorders, the largest currently available. Mount Sinai’s NextStep Carrier Screening also includes the most comprehensive panel of tests for 96 diseases found in the Ashkenazi Jewish population and is the first of its kind to address the largely overlooked needs of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish populations.

“Building on years of in-house genetic research and technology adaptation in our clinical laboratory, we created tests that not only expand the number of diseases screened, but also increase the breadth of coverage, to improve carrier detection rates and provide more accurate residual risk estimates to patients,” says Lisa Edelmann, PhD, Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory within the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences. (more…)

Genetic Testing Under Way in Connecticut

Genetic Testing Under Way in Connecticut

In Mount Sinai’s Branford, Connecticut, laboratory, Research Associate Courtney Pietropaolo prepares DNA samples for sequencing.

In its first full year of operation, the Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory in Branford, Connecticut, has become an integral part of the Mount Sinai Health System’s efforts to better diagnose and treat disease.

The 16,400-square-foot facility, located 85 miles from New York City, has the high-throughput equipment to sequence thousands of samples monthly to uncover variations in DNA that code for Alzheimer’s and coronary disease, and cancer, among other diseases. (more…)

New Chairs for Orthopaedics and Neurology

Leesa M. Galatz, MD

Leesa M. Galatz, MD

Two renowned physicians and researchers—Leesa M. Galatz, MD, and Barbara G. Vickrey, MD, MPH—recently became the Mount Sinai Health System Chair of Orthopaedics, and Neurology, respectively, at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Galatz was recruited from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Chief of the Shoulder and Elbow Service. Dr. Vickrey had served for 25 years on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she was Professor of Neurology. (more…)

Use of Big Data Leads to Discovery in Diabetes

Joel Dudley, PhDAfter carefully analyzing the electronic health records (EHRs) of 11,000 patients, investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have discovered three potential new subtypes of type 2 diabetes.

The discovery, led by Joel Dudley, PhD, Director of Biomedical Informatics at the Icahn School of Medicine, highlights the power of new technology and the promise of precision medicine, as the Mount Sinai Health System ushers in the use of Big Data in discovering, treating, and preventing disease. The results of the study were published in Science Translational Medicine in October, 2015. (more…)

Pin It on Pinterest