Mount Sinai Awarded $25 Million to Study the Environment’s Influence on People’s Health Throughout Their Lifetimes

(New York, NY – October 22, 2019) – Three world-renowned environmental health researchers from the Institute for Exposomic Research at Mount Sinai have been awarded grants worth a total of $25 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the newly formed Human Health Environmental Assessment Resource (HHEAR). This program is dedicated to measuring all the environmental factors faced in people’s lives—a new science called “exposomics,” which is expected to yield important insights about disease processes and potential treatments. 

The NIH established the HHEAR Laboratory Network Hub research network to facilitate novel research into children’s and adults’ environmental health. The goal of the consortium is to provide scientific researchers access to state-of–the-art laboratory analyses and advanced statistical data analyses \of all the measurable environmental exposures that people face, so researchers can better understand why children and adults develop diseases like autism, asthma, heart disease, or even cancer. Additionally, HHEAR will make exposomic data publicly available and provide tools to allow the near-effortless pooling of the data across studies, so researchers around the world can better understand the effects of thousands of environmental exposures on health across people’s lifespans.

“This program is another giant step in the growth of our exposomics program. Mount Sinai is the only institution to be awarded multiple components of the large HHEAR research program with three large grants in exposomics, illustrating our leadership in the field,” said Robert Wright, MD, MPH, Ethel H. Wise Chair of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Co-Director of the Institute for Exposomic Research. “These three grants will further propel the Institute for Exposomic Research at Mount Sinai to the forefront of efforts to measure the exposome, the totality of environmental exposures from conception and throughout life. We believe studying the exposome is crucial to understanding how the complex mix of nutritional, chemical, and social environments affects health, disease, and development and to translate those findings into new strategies for prevention and treatment.”

The NIH awarded Dr. Wright funding for a HHEAR Laboratory Network Hub that studies mixtures of hundreds of exposures to substances. The lab will measure these exposures across all life stages to help NIH-funded researchers improve medical treatments and prevent diseases. The substances to be studied include lead, mercury, and other metals; plastics; pesticides; flame retardants; endocrine-disrupting chemicals; and tobacco metabolites, using state-of the art methods that take samples from sources including teeth, hair, and blood.

The NIH awarded Manish Arora, PhD, MPH, the Edith J. Baerwald Professor and Vice Chair of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Director of the Lautenberg Laboratory for Environmental Sciences, funding for a HHEAR Laboratory Hub that studies unidentified chemical exposures. This grant will use a suite of “omic” technologies to measure exposure to environmental chemicals and their metabolites as well as the internal response to those exposures. His grant works in tandem with Dr. Wright’s grant by discovering previously unknown chemical exposures that are then targeted for health research.

“Our team will build upon its highly successful work in creating novel methods to measure current and past chemical exposures in novel biological matrices and develop new assays that arise from HHEAR’s resources,” said Dr. Arora. “This project links highly experienced environmental health scientists with physicians, toxicologists, environmental researchers, chemists, exposure scientists, epidemiologists, and computer scientists to build the infrastructure and capacity to objectively measure the human exposome.”

Susan Teitelbaum, PhD, Research Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, also received funding for the HHEAR Data Center which provides statistical analysis and data science expertise that is critical for advancing understanding of the complex “soup” of chemicals that affect people daily. The Data Center will incorporate scientific high-performance super-computing capabilities that Mount Sinai is known for to maximize the potential use and impact of environmental data within and outside of HHEAR, and will leverage the potential of big data to accelerate environmental health studies far beyond their original funded goals.

“This center has the potential to accomplish research that was previously thought unfeasible or too costly, through the use of recently developed big data techniques,” said Dr. Teitelbaum. “The HHEAR Data Center is critical to advancing the scientific community’s ability to examine the environment on an exposome scale.”

About The Institute for Exposomic Research

The Institute for Exposomic Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is the world’s first research institute devoted to the intensive study of the exposome, or the totality of environmental influences on human health. The mission of the Institute is to understand how the complex mix of nutritional, chemical, and social environments affect health, disease, and development later in life and to translate those findings into new strategies for prevention and treatment. For more information, visit http://icahn.mssm.edu/exposomics.

About the Mount Sinai Health System The Mount Sinai Health System is New York City’s largest integrated delivery system, encompassing eight hospitals, a leading medical school, and a vast network of ambulatory practices throughout the greater New York region. Mount Sinai’s vision is to produce the safest care, the highest quality, the highest satisfaction, the best access and the best value of any health system in the nation. The Health System includes approximately 7,480 primary and specialty care physicians; 11 joint-venture ambulatory surgery centers; more than 410 ambulatory practices throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida; and 31 affiliated community health centers. The Icahn School of Medicine is one of three medical schools that have earned distinction by multiple indicators: ranked in the top 20 by U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Medical Schools”, aligned with a U.S. News & World Report’s “Honor Roll” Hospital, No. 12 in the nation for National Institutes of Health funding, and among the top 10 most innovative research institutions as ranked by the journal Nature in its Nature Innovation Index. This reflects a special level of excellence in education, clinical practice, and research. The Mount Sinai Hospital is ranked No. 14 on U.S. News & World Report’s “Honor Roll” of top U.S. hospitals; it is one of the nation’s top 20 hospitals in Cardiology/Heart Surgery, Diabetes/Endocrinology, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Geriatrics, Gynecology, Nephrology, Neurology/Neurosurgery, and Orthopedics in the 2019-2020 “Best Hospitals” issue. Mount Sinai’s Kravis Children’s Hospital also is ranked nationally in five out of ten pediatric specialties by U.S. News & World Report. The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is ranked 12th nationally for Ophthalmology and Mount Sinai South Nassau is ranked 35th nationally for Urology. Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, Mount Sinai West, and Mount Sinai South Nassau are ranked regionally. For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

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