Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core

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Project Summary Mount Sinai's Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures was established in 2014 with the mission to promote transdisciplinary environmental health research across the life course. The Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core fulfills several critical components of our this mission by providing access to measures of environmental exposure, molecular biomarkers of effect and even human study populations that can be leveraged by Center Members in their Environmental health research. The IHSFC will continue to foster studies of environmental health sciences that embrace emerging concepts and technologies, such as mixtures, the “exposome” and satellite-based remote sensing of air pollution (a new service this grant cycle). The IHSFC encourages research that moves beyond reductionist studies assessing chemical toxicity in isolation to consider the totality of the environment, the context of exposure (nutrition/social environment or sex) and the complex interactions among these factors that ultimately predict our health. In keeping with the Center's mission to study transdisciplinary environmental health, the IHSFC serves as a gateway to a variety of expertise and resources under a single administrative umbrella. This structure provides an intellectual milieu that promotes collaboration, as the IHSFC is the transdisciplinary “heart” of the Center and functions as a central hub through which Center Members have access to multiple venues of service, from consultation on toxicologic properties of chemicals, to consultation on collection and measurement of standard and novel exposure biomarkers, to measurement of molecular biomarkers of effect, and to accessing existing cohorts and clinical populations. Our mission is to help investigators establish teams of collaborators who, together, will extend the boundaries of environmental health sciences. To achieve this, the IHSFC also develops cutting edge environmental measurements and biological response assays for Center Members, such as our highly successful tooth based biomarker of metal exposure that reconstructs past exposure dose and exposure timing. This biomarker played a key role in our recent NIH grant success being featured in 2 successful R01s, a K award and 2 ECHO cohort grants. In the coming grant cycle, we will continue to develop additional innovative methods to comprehensively measure exposure to environment insults, facilitate access to research populations and biospecimen archives, and guide researchers to existing core services across Mount Sinai. The IHSFC does not replicate services provided by other Mount Sinai core labs. Rather, we leverage and supplement other cores, such as our Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) funded cores, and facilitate access to CTSA core lab assays. Overall, the IHSFC of the Mount P30 Core Center at Mount Sinai is a critical resource that allows researchers to build highly efficient and collaborative teams that can address the role of environment on health across the life course.