Mount Sinai Innovation Spotlight: Exposomics and the Study Of Environmental Exposures on Health
The Mount Sinai Co-Lab is an open innovation program designed to find solutions to healthcare challenges that have the potential to impact health globally. Solving tomorrow’s healthcare challenges requires today’s preeminent organizations to interface with healthcare systems in ways that they haven’t needed to in the past. The Mount Sinai Health System has believed in the power of collaboration with external partners and continues to activate new initiatives with successful relationships.
In 2014, Mount Sinai Health System partnered with The Honest Company to open The Honest Company Ultra Clean Room, a state-of-the-art facility that uses specialized technology to measure the impact of chemicals in the environment on children’s health. Earlier this year, the Honest Company funded postdoctoral fellows with “innovation grants” to conduct research on environmental influences on children’s health. Below is a brief case study on the partnership:
Background
“The exposome is a new research field and is analogous to genomics,” says Dr. Robert Wright, Ethel H. Wise Professor and Chair, Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, and Director, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory. “While genomics concerns all the genetic factors that predict health, the exposome encompasses all the environmental factors that affect your health, including nutrition, social factors, chemicals, and the physical environment. To understand health, you must understand both fields.”
Exposomics has the potential to dramatically redefine how we measure the impact of external factors on our health and wellness.
The Honest Company is dedicated to helping people live happy and healthy lives. Founded in 2012, the mission-driven company provides 100+ safe and effective products across a wide range of consumer categories, including baby, personal care, beauty, home care, and vitamins & supplements, to a passionate community of consumers united by values and style.
Opportunity
In March of 2018, The Honest Company awarded The Institute for Exposomics Research at Mount Sinai $100,000 to fund two postdoctoral fellows conducting research in children’s environmental health.
Collaboration
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is establishing the Institute for Exposomic Research under the leadership of Robert O. Wright, MD, MPH, and Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, two international leaders in environmental health. The Institute, the first in the world focused on exposomics, will study the effects of environmental exposures on health and will translate these findings into new strategies for prevention and treatment.
The Co-Lab is designed to foster long-term partnerships much like the partnership with The Honest Company.
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The Mount Sinai Co-Lab is an open innovation program designed to find solutions to healthcare challenges that have the potential to impact health globally. Solving tomorrow’s healthcare challenges requires today’s preeminent organizations to interface with healthcare systems in ways that they haven’t needed to in the past. The Co-Lab fosters long-term partnership between preeminent organizations and Mount Sinai’s forward-thinking leadership, faculty, and students. Participating organizations are matched with a navigator, a Connector-In-Residence across the Mount Sinai Health System that helps hone in on nodes of value and activate the right Mount Sinai resources to optimize partnership.
