Gift to Icahn to establish precision wellness center

The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has received a $5 million gift that will establish the Harris Center for Precision Wellness.

The center is part of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology and will develop innovative approaches to health monitoring and wellness management by integrating emerging technologies in digital health, data science and genomics to enable people’s health to be treated in precise, highly individualized ways, according to a release. The center will provide a focus for a network of precision wellness research programs closely tied to clinical initiatives across the Mount Sinai Health System.

“A number of research initiatives already underway at the Icahn Institute are focused on driving a greater understanding of health and wellness,” said Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. “The new Harris Center will accelerate this momentum toward developing novel tools and approaches enabling precision wellness.”

The Harris Center’s immediate efforts will focus on digital health, molecular profiling and data science. The center is evaluating wearable devices to see how reliably they can measure activity, stress, sleep, cognitive functioning, mood, and environmental exposures and using sequencing technology to bring DNA, Microbiome and immune system profiles into predictive models of wellness.

The Harris Center will be directed by Joel Dudley, PhD, a genomics and bioinformatics expert at the Icahn Institute, and by Gregory Stock, PhD, a life-science entrepreneur and technology-innovation expert recruited to serve as the center’s co-director.