Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core

Icahn School Of Medicine At Mount Sinai, New York NY

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

Project Summary (IHSFC) The mission of the Mount Sinai Center on Health and Environment Across the LifeSpan (HEALS) is to promote team-based environmental health science (EHS) research that embraces the developmental origins of health and disease paradigm while adopting new initiatives in clinical research and a life course approach to EHS. The Center will continue to foster environmental health studies on life-stage specific research by providing expert guidance, and technologies, such as the “exposome”, novel teeth and hair biomarkers, and satellite-based remote sensing for air pollution, light-at-night, greenness, and walkability, leveraging laboratory and clinical resources. The Center will also have a focus on health promotion by promoting research in ultraprocessed food chemicals within its membership and by supporting research in clinical populations that have long been mainly studied through genetic approaches- such as children with Autism. A key element of the P30 Center is the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core (IHSFC). In keeping with the Center’s mission to study environmental health over the lifespan, the IHSFC serves as a gateway to a variety of expertise and resources under a single administrative umbrella. This structure provides an intellectual milieu that promotes collaboration, as the IHSFC is the transdisciplinary “heart” of the Center and functions as a central hub through which Center Members have access to multiple venues of service, from consultation on study design, research technologies, and access to standard and novel exposure biomarkers and molecular testing. We also facilitate access to biorepositories and clinical/ epidemiological populations. The overarching mission of the IHSFC is to help investigators establish teams of collaborators who together will extend the boundaries of environmental health sciences into research on chronic diseases. To achieve this, the IHSFC will provide consultations to Center Members that leverage the ideal study design that can effectively study a research question, while providing access to biomarkers that can facilitate EHS research. It will continue to develop innovative methods to comprehensively measure past exposure to environment insults, facilitate access to clinical populations and biospecimen archives and guide researchers to existing core services across Mount Sinai. The IHSFC will not replicate services provided by other Mount Sinai core labs, such as those supported by our Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA). Rather, the IHSFC leverages and supplements CTSA resources to facilitate access to multiple core lab assays and institutional biobanks(BioME). Overall, the IHSFC will be a crucual resource that allows researchers to build highly efficient and collaborative teams that can positively impact health across the lifespan through rigorous scientific research.