Philanthropic Gift to Mount Sinai Establishes The Nash Family Center for Advanced Circuit Therapeutics
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."
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Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with more than 43,000 employees working across eight hospitals, over 400 outpatient practices, nearly 300 labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time — discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.
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