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