Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Receives National Institutes of Health Award to Accelerate Development of New Treatments
$55.5 million grant has potential to significantly enhance quality of research and patient care among all populations
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has been awarded a five-year, $55.5 million Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that will benefit the patient population Mount Sinai serves by accelerating the development of new treatments for leading health conditions, including cardiorespiratory and psychiatric disorders, diabetes, malignancies, and infectious diseases. In particular, this award will be critical to support Mount Sinai’s ongoing response to emerging priorities such as the initial and longer term management of COVID-19.
The grant will support the work of ConduITS, the Institute for Translational Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, which is one of 63 sites nationwide in the CTSA Program. Founded in 2009, ConduITS is dedicated to launching clinical studies quickly; enhancing collaborations with other CTSA Programs, community providers, patients, and industry; and promoting team science and effective methods for recruitment and retention of clinical research participants.
This is the third clinical and translational science award that ConduITS has received since 2009. The grant will enable the Mount Sinai Health System to harness its unique strengths in translational research informatics, digital health, and data science to accelerate the translation of research into discoveries that lead to better health outcomes for a patient population across the lifespan. In particular, it will enable ConduITs to evolve its approach to precision medicine to include a precision public health framework that integrates genomics with key public health domains such as environmental health, social determinants of health, and big-data science to address health equity challenges.
“This grant confirms that Mount Sinai is a leader in clinical translational science nationwide. Many CTSA Programs at other leading health systems across the United States leverage unique aspects of our site, such as high performance computing, research informatics, and our exposomics infrastructure, which is beneficial for us and for the entire network,” says Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, Director of ConduITS, the Horace W. Goldsmith Professor of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital, and Dean for Translational Biomedical Sciences at Icahn Mount Sinai.
“With this grant, we will be able to expand that infrastructure to, for example, continue building our integrated informatics ecosystem to facilitate big-data science across the network and enhance accessibility to data streams needed for researchers who are tackling society’s most pressing and complex health-related challenges such as health inequities, thus creating the potential to improve outcomes for all across our patient populations. In this way the grant, and the science that it will facilitate, ultimately has the potential to be highly impactful in the delivery of health care. This infrastructure proved to be critical during the COVID-19 pandemic and enabled the rapid understanding of this new disease and the development of new vaccines and treatments.”
The time frame for development of new treatments is typically lengthy, between 10 to 15 years from initial scientific discovery to market launch. ConduITS will use the grant to continue to accelerate that development process and transform the local, regional, and national translational research network by:
- Fostering transdisciplinary learning and team science to encourage innovation through collaborations and analysis across medical disciplines, including emerging fields such as precision medicine, exposomics, and public health.
- Engaging a wide range of translational research stakeholders locally and nationally, including CTSA Programs, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and most critically, patients.
- Incorporating translational research, with particular focus on perinatal and pediatric research, geriatric populations, and populations impacted by health disparities.
“Mount Sinai serves one of the biggest and most patient populations in the world, and our footprint as a health system has grown significantly,” Dr. Wright says. “This grant enables us to keep pace with that growth and better serve our patients by raising the bar for the research we conduct and the care we provide. By sharing the discoveries and infrastructure made possible by the grant, we can further support the entire CTSA Program in achieving the same goals, enabling our field to better address the health care challenges we, and our patients, are facing.”
About the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is internationally renowned for its outstanding research, educational, and clinical care programs. It is the sole academic partner for the seven member hospitals* of the Mount Sinai Health System, one of the largest academic health systems in the United States, providing care to New York City’s large and patient population.
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai offers highly competitive MD, PhD, MD-PhD, and master’s degree programs, with enrollment of more than 1,200 students. It has the largest graduate medical education program in the country, with more than 2,600 clinical residents and fellows training throughout the Health System. Its Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences offers 13 degree-granting programs, conducts innovative basic and translational research, and trains more than 560 postdoctoral research fellows.
Ranked 11th nationwide in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is among the 99th percentile in research dollars per investigator according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. More than 4,500 scientists, educators, and clinicians work within and across dozens of academic departments and multidisciplinary institutes with an emphasis on translational research and therapeutics. Through Mount Sinai Innovation Partners (MSIP), the Health System facilitates the real-world application and commercialization of medical breakthroughs made at Mount Sinai.
* Mount Sinai Health System member hospitals: The Mount Sinai Hospital; Mount Sinai Brooklyn; Mount Sinai Morningside; Mount Sinai Queens; Mount Sinai South Nassau; Mount Sinai West; and New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with 48,000 employees working across seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, more than 600 research and clinical labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time—discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.
Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 9,000 primary and specialty care physicians and 10 free-standing joint-venture centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida. Hospitals within the System are consistently ranked by Newsweek’s® “The World’s Best Smart Hospitals, Best in State Hospitals, World Best Hospitals and Best Specialty Hospitals” and by U.S. News & World Report's® “Best Hospitals” and “Best Children’s Hospitals.” The Mount Sinai Hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report® “Best Hospitals” Honor Roll for 2025-2026.
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.