Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Receives Award From U.S. Department of Defense to Develop Technology That Measures Threat Exposures
Epigenetic technology will provide a new tool in the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have been awarded a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research agency within the U.S. Department of Defense, to find molecular signatures in blood that identify previous exposures and time of exposure to materials that could be associated with weapons of mass destruction (including infectious agents, chemicals, and radiation). The contract will also underwrite development of a field-deployable instrument that can perform highly specific forensic and diagnostic analyses to reveal the type and time of exposure.
The contract, worth up to $27.8 million over four years as part of DARPA’s new Epigenetic Characterization and Observation (ECHO) program, will be used to develop new approaches to analyze epigenetic markers and to develop new instrumentation that can be used in the field by an operator with minimal training. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researchers will lead a consortium comprising six other academic and two industry partners.
The epigenome is biology’s record keeper. Though DNA does not change over a person’s lifetime, the environment may leave marks on the DNA that modify how that person’s genes are expressed. The epigenome is the combination of all these modifications over time. Although the modifications caused by an environmental exposure can register within seconds to minutes, they imprint on the epigenome for decades, leaving a time-stamped biography of an individual’s exposures.
“Current forensic and diagnostic screening technologies can only detect the immediate presence of many materials and require sensitive instruments,” says Stuart Sealfon, MD, Director of the Center for Translational Systems Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Principal Investigator of the contract. “The human body logs exposures in a rich biographical record that we carry around with us in our epigenomes. The ECHO technology we and our partners are developing through the DARPA program will enable us to quickly read someone’s epigenome from a small amount of blood to reveal possible exposure to infectious agents, chemicals, or radiation, even when other physical evidence has been erased.”
The hope is that with the capabilities developed through the ECHO project, someone in the field will immediately know if an adversary has handled or been exposed to threat agents. The same technology could also serve as a tool to diagnose infectious disease or reveal exposure to threat agents in our own military troops, so that medical countermeasures can be applied in time to make a difference. In addition, ECHO technology could open up new sources of forensic evidence that make battlefield collection of evidence safer, more efficient, and more accurate. By making it possible to deploy an analytical capability to vastly more locations, the military can enhance its ability to conduct global, near-real-time surveillance of emerging threats.
While the ECHO program is specifically focused on diminishing the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction and improving diagnostics for troops who may have been exposed to threat agents, many aspects of the new technologies that will be developed should have applications well beyond national security, for example in medical diagnosis and next generation laboratory research instruments. Accordingly, DARPA intends to proactively engage with several independent ethical and legal experts to help inform the Agency’s research plans, think through potential issues, and foster a broader dialogue in the scientific community on social implications.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with 48,000 employees working across eight hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, more than 600 research and clinical 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.
Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 9,000 primary and specialty care physicians and 11 free-standing joint-venture centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida. Hospitals within the System are consistently ranked by Newsweek’s® “The World’s Best Smart Hospitals, Best in State Hospitals, World Best Hospitals and Best Specialty Hospitals” and by U.S. News & World Report's® “Best Hospitals” and “Best Children’s Hospitals.” The Mount Sinai Hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report® “Best Hospitals” Honor Roll for 2024-2025.
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.