Mount Sinai Awarded Nearly $7 Million From National Institutes of Health to Lead New York Coalition in Recruiting Participants for All of Us Research Program

Mount Sinai Awarded Nearly $7 Million From National Institutes of Health to Lead New York Coalition in Recruiting Participants for All of Us Research Program 
Health System to serve as a lead core enrollment site for diverse, national health database

Newswise — (New York, NY – November 11, 2024) – The Mount Sinai Health System has been awarded nearly $7 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to lead a New York coalition of the NIH’s All of Us Research Program. Approximately $1.3 million of this award was provided through the NIH Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative, or NIH HEAL Initiative, to increase efforts to recruit participants who use or have used substances, particularly opioids.

All of Us is a historic effort to gather data from 1 million or more people in the United States, with the goal of accelerating health research and medical breakthroughs and enabling individualized prevention, treatment, and care. Mount Sinai will also work to increase the number of participants from various demographics, regions, and stages of opioid use disorder to address the public health crisis of overdose deaths.

The New York coalition will include academic medical centers and community partners with expertise in engaging, recruiting, and retaining participants often underrepresented in biomedical research in New York City—one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse enclaves in the world. Along with Mount Sinai, the group of collaborators includes Weill Cornell Medicine, New York City Health + Hospitals, the Institute for Family Health, and NYU Langone. The New York coalition will try to recruit more participants across the tri-state area to join the NIH’s All of Us Research Program in the first year.

“This multi-institutional effort will fill a gap to significantly increase recruitment of participants in an area of the country with rich diversity,” said Principal Investigator Monica Kraft, MD, the Murray M. Rosenberg Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “Our partnership encompasses dozens of hospitals and medical practices, longstanding collaborations, senior research investigators, and seasoned staff with experience in recruiting diverse populations. We will work closely with the All of Us consortium and key partners, assess the impact of our activities, identify best practices, and share both our expertise and discoveries along the way. We look forward to continuing to build on our strong and robust IT, data science, clinical, data collection, and electronic health record infrastructures.”

The coalition will join the other All of Us healthcare provider organizations to also enroll new participants with opioid use disorder, a condition that has affected millions across the United States amid the opioid crisis and overdose epidemic. Since 2019, the majority of overdose deaths in the U.S. have involved synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which are significantly more potent and deadly than heroin and prescription opioids. There are distinct racial disparities among those with opioid use disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: although opioid use is more common among white Americans, Black adults and teens experienced a steeper increase in the rate of fatal opioid overdoses than whites during the last decade.

Three Icahn Mount Sinai leaders join Dr. Kraft as Principal Investigators for the New York coalition: Bruce D. Gelb, MD, Dean for Child Health Research, the Gogel Family Professor and Director of The Mindich Child Health and Development Institute, and Director of the Center for Molecular Cardiology; Carol R. Horowitz, MD, MPH, Dean for Gender Equity in Science and Medicine, Director of the Institute for Health Equity Research, and Professor of Medicine, and Population Health Science and Policy; and Girish N. Nadkarni, MD, MPH, Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine, Director of The Charles Bronfman Institute of Personalized Medicine, and System Chief of the Division of Data-Driven and Digital Medicine.

“Our participation in the All of Us Research Program is a significant step towards revolutionizing health care through the power of multimodal data,” said Dr. Nadkarni. “This award will enable us to harness cutting-edge technologies and integrate vast amounts of health information to uncover new insights and accelerate the development of personalized treatments. The world can leverage this comprehensive dataset to identify novel biomarkers, predict disease progression, and ultimately enhance clinical outcomes.”

Dr. Horowitz added: “Mount Sinai has a longstanding and deep commitment to health equity. Working in close partnership with expert clinicians, patients, and community advocates, we will ensure that our New York neighbors from more disadvantaged backgrounds and who have experienced health disparities are among the first to benefit from the advances in science and medicine that stem from All of Us.”

The investigators will harness insights from trusted networks and communities of ongoing research they currently lead, including The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine’s BioMe BioBank program, which supports rapid analysis from electronic medical information; the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program, which aims to carry out genetic sequencing of 1 million Mount Sinai patients within the next five years; and the NIH Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative, which is examining the long-term effects of COVID-19.

The All of Us Research Program was launched nationally in 2018 with a goal of engaging a million or more participants who reflect the diversity of the United States and its territories. Participants contribute a broad range of health data so that researchers can accelerate medical breakthroughs, enabling individualized prevention, treatment, and care for all. The program defines diversity broadly, including different races and ethnicities, age groups, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, education levels, disability, and health status. The comprehensive dataset is housed on a secure cloud-based platform. Registered researchers can access information from surveys, genomic analyses, electronic health records, physical measurements, and wearables to study a range of factors that influence health and disease, including the environment, lifestyle, and genes. To date, more than 845,000 people have enrolled in the program.

The All of Us Research Program at Mount Sinai is funded by National Institutes of Health award OT2OD037643, with additional funding from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse through the NIH HEAL Initiative, under award number 3OT2OD037643-01S1. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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.

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