Two Mount Sinai Institutes to Join $215 Million Public-Private Partnership to Increase Patients’ Immunotherapy Success
The Tisch Cancer Institute and the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai Health System are part of a $215 million public-private Cancer Moonshot research collaboration launched by the National Institutes of Health and 11 leading pharmaceutical companies.
“We are at the critical juncture of really understanding why patients respond or don’t respond to checkpoint blockade immunotherapy,” said Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Director of the Precision Immunology Institute and the Human Immune Monitoring Center and co-leader of the Cancer Immunology program at The Tisch Cancer Institute . “The immune monitoring approaches funded by this grant application will lead to a real paradigm shift in clinical trials, which now can be designed based on scientific evidence to attack each patient’s unique cancer.”
The five-year initiative, called Partnership for Accelerating Cancer Therapies (PACT), will initially focus on efforts to identify, develop, and validate robust biomarkers—standardized biological markers of disease and treatment response—to advance new immunotherapy treatments that harness the immune system to attack cancer. Immunotherapies have emerged as highly promising approaches to treat cancer patients, but only a minority of cancer patients have benefited so far. This collaboration will dive deep into tumors and the immune system’s interactions with them at the cellular and molecular level to identify biomarkers present in malignant and healthy tissues to figure out how to make immunotherapies work for more patients.
The PACT initiative includes a total award of $53.6 million over five years to Mount Sinai and three other cancer centers (Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Stanford Cancer Institute, and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center) to perform immune monitoring and analysis of clinical trials that test cancer immunotherapy drugs. The Mount Sinai team includes immunologists, clinical trial investigators, geneticists, pathologists, microbiologists, computer scientists, and data analysts who will use innovative techniques to extract as much information as possible from tumor, blood, and stool specimens collected from patients throughout treatment.
“We are thrilled to be a recipient of this grant, particularly because it recognizes that the key to developing better cancer immunotherapies is to understand how the immune system changes and interacts with tumors throughout treatment,” said Sacha Gnjatic, PhD, Associate Director of the Human Immune Monitoring Center and Associate Professor of Immunology and Hematology and Oncology at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Our goal for this effort is to be as innovative as possible while still standardizing our approaches across many clinical trials, so that our research can efficiently guide clinicians and identify ways to help more patients.”
Led by the Human Immune Monitoring Center at the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai, researchers will develop innovative techniques that will also be able to be reliably reproduced so that the information can be quickly translated into useful tests to increase the chances of response to treatment in cancer centers across the country. Researchers will cast a wide net to measure the effect of immunotherapy drugs on tissues, cells, bacteria, proteins, and genes. Mount Sinai scientists also aim to understand how the immune system’s strength, particularly in the gut flora, before patients even start treatment helps explain their clinical outcomes.
“The Tisch Cancer Institute is committed to conduct innovative profiling of the immune system to determine the best approaches for therapy and prevention,” said Ramon Parsons, MD, PhD, Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute, Ward-Coleman Chair in Cancer Research, and Chair of the Department of Oncological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This groundbreaking Cancer Moonshot collaboration between industry, government, medicine, and academia is a great new initiative toward bringing the most effective and individualized treatments to more patients sooner.”
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the nation’s leading integrated academic health systems and one of the largest in the New York metropolitan area. The Health System includes approximately 48,000 employees, more than 9,000 physicians, and 8,600 nurses across seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, over 600 research and clinical laboratories, a school of nursing, and schools of medicine and graduate school of biomedical sciences.
As a leading learning health system, Mount Sinai combines clinical expertise with scientific discovery to improve patient care while training the next generation of health care and biomedical leaders. The Health System provides care across every stage of life, from prenatal care through geriatrics, while advancing personalized medicine through artificial intelligence, data science, and biomedical research.
Mount Sinai is consistently recognized among the nation’s leading academic health systems for patient care, research, and education. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 1 in New York and recognized as one of the world’s top Smart Hospital by Newsweek. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai ranks No. 11 among U.S. medical schools for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding and No. 1 among freestanding medical schools, reflecting the strength of its scientific enterprise and leadership in biomedical research.
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube. To listen to news and stories from Mount Sinai, visit the Mount Sinai Podcast Network.
Mount Sinai’s Cancer Science in the Spotlight at 2025 ASCO
May 29, 2025 View All Press Releases
Mount Sinai Showcases Innovative Cancer Research at 2025 AACR Annual Meeting in Chicago
Apr 24, 2025 View All Press Releases
Study Identifies New Gene That Drives Colon Cancer
Oct 14, 2022 View All Press Releases
