Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute https://www.rpi.edu and the Icahn School of Medicine https://icahn.mssm.edu at Mount Sinai have formed the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM), to bridge engineering and engineering science with medicine.
The Center to be located in New York with research being done at the Rensselaer in Troy N.Y., will share basic research discoveries, explore unique therapeutic innovations in cancer, Alzheimer’s, and a myriad of infectious diseases, educate a new generation of biomedical leaders, and develop new technologies and processes to enhance patient outcomes in unprecedented ways.
The Center will drive advances in point-of-care and point-of-use devices and diagnostics, micro- physiological platforms for discovery and diagnosis, robotic surgery, biomedical imaging, therapeutics biomanufacturing, and AI and ML applied to biomedical data.
The CEPM will focus on three critical research areas at the interface of engineering and medicine:
- Neuroengineering which exploits minimally invasive control and regulation of neural circuitry to target neurodegenerative diseases, brain computer/network analysis, neuro diagnostics, and computational neurobiology
- Immunoengineering, which focuses on developing designer immune cells, microbiome engineering, and on-demand anti-infectives and synthetic vaccines to help people fight cancer and infectious diseases
- Regenerative and reparative medicine to encompass on-demand personalized tissue repair and regeneration, organoids (3D tissue culture that mimics simplified organ function), and cellular reprogramming
To foster innovation, CEPM will develop a five year joint PhD in engineering and precision medicine that will provide fundamental biological sciences, data analytics, along with engineering knowledge and skills to pursue breakthroughs in medical science.