New York City-based Mount Sinai was granted $25 million from the National Institutes of Health to study how environmental factors influence people's health, according to an Oct. 22 news release.
The funding is part of NIH's Human Health Environmental Assessment Resource Laboratory Network Hub, which was developed to facilitate research into patients' environmental health. Researchers at Mount Sinai will measure patients' environmental exposure and its links to diseases, including asthma, heart disease and cancer.
Mount Sinai and HHEAR will make exposomic data publicly available.
At Mount Sinai, Robert Wright, MD, chair of environmental medicine and public health, and his team will study mixtures of hundreds of exposures to substances such as lead, mercury, plastics, pesticides, flame retardants, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and tobacco metabolites. Dr. Wright will evaluate the exposures across a patient's lifetime to develop medical treatments and preventive solutions.
"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 Manish Arora, PhD, vice chair of environmental medicine and public health at Mount Sinai. "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 human exposome."