Keynote Speaker George Church, PhD, Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School
The increasingly important role that academic medical centers play in the discovery of treatments for human diseases was the central theme of the Fifth Annual SinaInnovations conference held Tuesday, October 25, and Wednesday, October 26, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Pharmaceutical industry executives and academicians from the nation’s top scientific and medical institutions participated in a series of panel discussions in Stern Auditorium on subjects that included novel approaches to drug screening, identifying targets, designing clinical trials, and funding therapeutic discovery.
In his opening remarks at SinaInnovations, Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, told the audience, “The revolution in biology will come from the labs of academic medicine. We are proud to stand at the leading edge.”
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, helped kick off the conference. He said, “Innovation and discovery are part of the DNA of the Mount Sinai Health System. We are the largest health system in New York City, and one of the largest in the United States. We take care of every ethnic group, every socioeconomic group. Our doctors see every disease known to mankind. So whose responsibility is it to make these discoveries? It is our responsibility.”
Conference participants from multiple disciplines discussed the complicated nature of drug development and the need for close collaboration between industry and academia, and between experts in big data, engineering, basic science, and translational research.
“This is a team sport,” said panel participant Lisa Boyette, MD, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of the nonprofit research accelerator Curable.
Panelist Lisa Boyette, MD, PhD
“Problems are more complex, solutions are complex. No one can be an expert in everything.”
Aled Edwards, PhD, Chief Executive Officer of the Structural Genomics Consortium, a Canadian-based public-private partnership to advance drug discovery, said, “The promise of academic medical centers is the ability to think differently. They have lots of smart young people and cultures that are not staid.”
Kevin Grimes, MD, Co-Director of the SPARK Translational Research Program at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “Academics bring a real fearlessness because we’re not beholden to shareholders and senior management. We can take risks and really have the freedom to do that.”
Access to patient samples and the ability to spend several years performing basic research on a particular target—performing science for science’s sake—were also the noted strengths of academic medical centers.
Keynote Speaker Drew M. Pardoll, MD, PhD, the Abeloff Professor of Oncology at Johns Hopkins Medicine
Cancer immunologist Drew M. Pardoll, MD, PhD, and several other renowned experts presented keynote addresses on topics ranging from therapeutic frontiers in mental health to health disparities in the developing world. In his address, Dr. Pardoll, Abeloff Professor of Oncology, and Director of the Bloomberg-Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins Medicine, discussed breakthroughs in cancer treatment. The CTLA-4 and PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors that were recently approved for treating some metastatic cancers, he said, were built upon many years of science that came before.
In his closing remarks, SinaInnovations leader Scott L. Friedman, MD, Dean for Therapeutic Discovery and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, reiterated Mount Sinai’s “commitment to making a difference in the quality and length of the lives of our patients.” He said the conference is about “electrifying” attendees. “It will be successful if it has planted new seeds for concepts, new directions, even a new way of looking at an old problem.”