From left: Ramon E. Parsons, MD, PhD; Neil S. Calman, MD; and Yasmin L. Hurd, PhD
Three Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai faculty members recently received the professional honor of being elected to the prestigious National Academy of Medicine (NAM): Neil S. Calman, MD, Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health; Yasmin L. Hurd, PhD, Director of the Addiction Institute and Ward-Coleman Chair in Translational Neuroscience; and Ramon E. Parsons, MD, PhD, Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute and Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research.
The esteemed group joins 21 Mount Sinai colleagues who also have received the professional distinction of being members of the NAM, formerly the Institute of Medicine, an independent organization that serves as a national and international advisor on health and related policy formation. Academy membership demonstrates outstanding commitment to issues related to health care, prevention of disease, education in the health professions, or biomedical research.
Neil S. Calman, MD: Providing low-income patients with affordable, accessible, and comprehensive health care
Dr. Calman joins fewer than 50 family physicians in an Academy populated mainly by the world’s leading medical specialists. His election rewards his work over three decades to reduce health disparities in the broad context of social and medical issues. “It’s the hallmark of what I have done,” he says.
Dr. Calman launched the Institute for Family Health in 1983 with a staff of four and became affiliated with Mount Sinai in 2012. Today, the Institute employs more than 1,400 staff and receives more than 650,000 patient visits annually to its 31 locations in Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, Harlem, the Bronx, and the Hudson Valley. It provides more than 102,000 low-income patients with services that include primary care, mental health, dental care, and social work that satisfy national standards for affordable, accessible, and comprehensive health care.
The Institute also trains health professionals, and operates three distinct family medicine residency programs and fellowships in women’s health and for family nurse practitioners. Dr. Calman has led the Institute’s research efforts that focus on improving health equities and making high-quality health care available to anyone in need.
Dr. Calman’s focus on population health and public health has earned him a long list of accolades, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Community Health Leadership Award, the American Academy of Family Physicians’s Public Health Award, The Pew Charitable Trusts’s Primary Care Achievement Award, and the Physician Advocacy Award from the Institute on Medicine as a Profession. Accreditation by The Joint Commission and recognition by the National Committee for Quality Assurance certify the highest levels of patient care.
Yasmin L. Hurd, PhD: Developing new treatments for addiction that really change lives
Having so many faculty members at the NAM is a testament to the quality of the work being done at Mount Sinai, says Dr. Hurd, a neuroscientist and founding Director of the Addiction Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine. “It proves the degree to which Mount Sinai is influencing the course of science, medicine, health care, and more. And that is pretty impressive.”
Discovering effective therapies for addiction has become a national call to action and is Dr. Hurd’s specialty. According to the 2016 U.S. Surgeon General’s Report, more than 20 million Americans have substance abuse disorders.
In studying the neurology behind addiction, Dr. Hurd’s laboratory at Mount Sinai examines the environmental and genetic causes of addiction visible in animal behavior, molecular biology, cell biology, pharmacology, psychology, neuroimaging, bioinformatics, and biotechnology. Her lab has analyzed human and animal tissues at the single-cell level and pioneered the technique of DREAMM (DREADD-assisted metabolic mapping), a source of high-resolution quantitative mapping of functional brain circuits associated with the disturbance of genes expressed in specific cell populations.
Dr. Hurd’s lab has made major inroads in addiction research by showing that marijuana use has different effects on developing brains and adult brains. Individuals who are exposed to the active ingredient in marijuana—tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—early in life, for example, show greater sensitivity to opiates, which could make them more vulnerable to addiction and other problems.
In addition, the changes it makes in the brain can last through adulthood and even into the next generation. In addition to THC, Dr. Hurd is testing cannabidiol, another active ingredient in marijuana, for its palliative effects. Evidence so far suggests its potential role in preventing relapses in heroin and cocaine addiction, reducing anxiety, and improving overall cognitive function. “I would say that my passion is developing treatments that really change lives,” Dr. Hurd says.
Ramon E. Parsons, MD, PhD: Enhancing translational research and collaborating on the complex puzzle of cancer
Dr. Parsons’s election to the NAM follows his 2017 appointment as Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute and the receipt of a $6.7 million award from the National Cancer Institute that will fund research into the tumor-suppressing functions of the PTEN gene—which encodes a phosphatase enzyme relevant to many types of cancer—that he discovered 20 years ago. Upon analyzing the gene’s sequences that exhibited mutations in cancers, he recalls “the ‘aha moment’ when we saw that the phosphatase—a tumor suppressor—was mutated.”
One of Dr. Parsons’s goals as Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute is to detect hypermutating cancers as early as possible in a patient’s diagnosis so that he or she can receive immune checkpoint therapy at the most advantageous point during treatment. This effort is based, in part, on research that Dr. Parsons began more than two decades ago as a fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine while investigating defective DNA repair that causes hypermutation in colon cancer.
His other goals for The Tisch Cancer Institute include enhancing the infrastructure for translational research, and expanding, recruiting, and training basic and clinical scientists to perform more patient-oriented research, as well as promoting research to address disparities in patient outcomes.
Multiple disciplines working in concert on cancer is pivotal, Dr. Parsons says. When experts with different perspectives collaborate on a complex puzzle, “the further into it you get, the more quickly you can try to finish it.” An optimist, he says, “You can’t be in the cancer field without seeing the glass half full. We must analyze in exquisite detail our success and why it is working, then compare that with failures to be able to develop better care for everyone.”