By Allison Proffitt

November 2, 2018 | Mount Sinai has named a new head for its Icahn Institute, and renamed the effort the Icahn Institute for Data Science and Genomic Technology. Adam Margolin will lead the new enterprise-wide program, whose 10-year plan includes 55 new faculty and staff, new computational infrastructure, and an educational program to train master’s students and PhDs in biomedical data science.

“We think we will be one of the first institutions—if not the first—that really embraces big data analysis as the foundation for how we pursue discovery and delivery of precision medicine,” Margolin told Clinical Informatics News. “We think that’s the future and the time to start the future is now.”

Margolin describes the new initiative as a continuation of the Icahn Institute’s previous work.

“The last phase of the Institute was building out the capabilities to integrate large-scale datasets, profile large datasets with molecular profiling technologies, and model mechanisms of disease through building multiscale models through advanced analytics. What we’re doing now with the institute is trying to take the next step to build on those capabilities to actually predict and translate new therapies.”

Guard Change

Margolin replaced Eric Schadt, who was the founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology in 2011. Schadt, then CSO at Pacific Biosciences, originally retained a non-operational position at PacBio while creating the Institute. Schadt launched Sema4, a startup he’d been incubating within the Institute, in 2017 and serves as the company’s CEO.

The name change marks a shift in focus, mission, and leadership. “We wanted the Institute name and the messaging around the Institute to be very directed around that specific mission,” Margolin says.

Margolin is a data scientist and computational biologist. As an undergraduate he studied data science at The Wharton School, interning for two summers at Bears Stern, the global investment bank, analyzing high yield bond data. But when the first human genomes were sequenced, he saw a new path for himself.

“I realized that the same type of skills I was using to analyze bond data could be used to analyze genomic data to understand the causes of disease, and ultimately develop therapies. I thought that would be a much more meaningful, rewarding, and challenging application of data science. And I haven’t looked back.”

He earned a Master’s degree in computer science, then a Ph.D. in biomedical informatics. Most recently, Margolin was Director of Computational Biology and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Oregon Health & Science University and, before that, Director of Computational Biology at Sage Bionetworks.

Ten Year Plan

Margolin joined Mount Sinai in April and has been working behind the scenes to ready the Institute for the public re-launch and set goals. Margolin says the almost all of the plan starts right away.

“Part of our mission statement is to move fast, and to move ambitiously and at scale. So, I actually do intend to pursue everything… right away.” Recruitment has already started, he said, to fill 30 new faculty members at the cutting edge of data science and genomic technology in addition to 25 data scientists to lead projects aimed at interpreting large-scale biomolecular data. “We want to attract real innovators in the field. The data scientists would be people who get offers to work at any Google or any Facebook or any large-scale data size organization, but people who really want to use these skills to make a difference for human health,” he said.

The Institute has hired a Chief Research Officer who will be overseeing capabilities to integrate and manage large-scale datasets within the organization and worldwide. And updates are coming to the Mount Sinai supercomputing center as well.

New education programs are accepting applicants for fall of 2019 in a Master’s program in data science and additional training for Ph.D. students in data science.

One longer-term vision is the launch cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary projects to discover new precision therapies in core disease areas. These will be rolled out once a year, Margolin says.

“We'll be working across all disease areas to make sure we remain a strong in those, but each year we'll really launching targeted cross-institutional programs in a given disease each year. We're planning probably to, in the coming years, launch initiatives in cancer, immunologic disease, brain disease, cardiovascular disease and other complex diseases.”

*Editor’s Note: This article was also featured on Bio-IT World.