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Philanthropic Gift to Mount Sinai Establishes The Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics
Newswise — (New York – March 26, 2019) The Nash family, whose philanthropic generosity has supported many important initiatives within the Mount Sinai Health System over nearly three decades, has made a new contribution to establish the Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics at Mount Sinai.
“The Nash family has supported the advancement of the neuroscience community at Mount Sinai for many years through an extraordinary commitment to brain research, enabling us to make important strides in understanding brain health and disease that help people around the world,” says Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, Director of The Friedman Brain Institute, and Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Their most recent gift has enabled the launch of The Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics, led by Helen S. Mayberg, MD, Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and an international expert in using brain circuit information to treat neuropsychiatric disorders. The Center brings together clinical colleagues in neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry with experts from neuroscience, brain imaging, bio-engineering and computational neuroscience. Through the Center, which is located at Mount Sinai West, an integrative team performs novel research that involves targeting circuits in the brain through surgical deep brain stimulation (DBS) to treat disorders like Parkinson’s disease, obsessive compulsive disorder, and depression.
“Deep brain stimulation is a pioneering surgical procedure that provides advanced therapies for movement disorders, but its transformative potential as a precision medicine therapy for a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders has not yet been fully realized,” says Dr. Mayberg. “New discoveries in genetics and cellular biology that are being powered by novel neuroanatomical, neurochemical, molecular, engineering, and computational tools have made it possible for us to watch, listen, interrogate, interpret, and modify brain activity at multiple scales of complexity—from single cells to specified connections between nerve cells to large-scale neural circuit networks that affect a wide range of behaviors. I am deeply grateful to the Nash family for affording our team the ability to discover, tailor, and deliver individualized care that will improve quality of life for large numbers of patients with circuit disorders.”
All DBS patients treated at the Center will undergo comprehensive imaging and both clinical and quantitative research assessments of movement, cognition, and mood to produce a multimodal big-data archive of common behavioral, physiological, and biological measures. Informed by the collected data and clinical outcomes across diagnoses, the Center will develop and implement novel, personalized, evidence-based surgical treatment algorithms using a given patient’s brain and performance signature. Further, quantitative clinical changes with ongoing DBS will be tracked in the Center’s neuroperformance Q-lab—an incubator for tool development and testing—to guide device adjustments that maximize symptom relief regardless of diagnosis or surgical target. These metrics, combined with the most up-to-date and comprehensive clinical care, will improve outcomes in the operating room, the clinic, and a patient’s home environment.
“The Nash family’s immense generosity has helped Mount Sinai become one of the premier centers of neuroscience research in the world,” says Paul J. Kenny, PhD, Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at Mount Sinai. “And now, their generous support has established this new Center, which will help to establish Mount Sinai as a leader in advanced circuit therapeutics, linking our outstanding basic research to improved clinical outcomes, and ultimately improving the lives of so many patients."
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. 18 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, Gastroenterology/GI Surgery, Geriatrics, Nephrology, and Neurology/Neurosurgery, and in the top 50 in six other specialties in the 2018-2019 "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 11th nationally for Ophthalmology and 44th for Ear, Nose, and Throat. Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Mount Sinai St. Luke's, Mount Sinai West, and South Nassau Communities Hospital are ranked regionally.
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