An upstate New York university is joining forces with a Manhattan institution to bridge medical research and engineering.
The Troy, NY-based Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have banded together to create the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM) in New York City.
According to RPI, the PhD program for the center will accommodate 30 to 40 students, with the center aiming to bring 100 or more Rensselaer undergraduates on a steady basis to New York City as research students, for capstone design or internships.
While RPI did not confirm any financial terms to Endpoints News, according to a New York real estate publication The Real Deal, a lease for 23,000 square feet was signed by RPI. The Real Deal stated that rent at the center’s listed address sits in the low $100s per square foot on a net basis.
“This transformative partnership between Rensselaer and Icahn Mount Sinai recognizes that engineering and engineering science is fundamental to the understanding of biomedical phenomena and is essential to the development of the next generation of precision diagnostics and therapeutics, human health and well-being and to the training of advanced researchers and physicians,” said RPI president Shirley Ann Jackson in a statement.
The center will initially focus on three research areas intersecting engineering and precision medicine and will be open for lab research in July 2023, according to RPI. Research, PhD approvals and hiring have already begun.
Expected research includes microengineering, targeting neurodegenerative diseases; neuro-diagnostics; and computational neurobiology, RPI says. It will also focus on immunoengineering in cancer and infectious disease space. Other research will also include developing medicines for tissue repair and cellular reprogramming, among other functions.
CEPM will develop a five-year joint PhD in engineering and precision medicine as well as other master’s degrees and certificate programs. The center has also initiated the process of securing state approval for such initiatives.
The Icahn School of Medicine and RPI have had a working relationship dating back several years. Since 2013, RPI has been the interdisciplinary hub for an institute-wide partnership with Icahn, as the partnership serves as both research-centered and entrepreneurial, the parties say. The partnership between Mount Sinai and RPI has secured $70 million in shared research funding since 2013.
