NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Joshua Harris and his wife Marjorie have made a $5 million gift to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to establish the Harris Center for Precision Wellness, the school announced today.
Harris is the co-founder of investment management firm Apollo Global Management.
The center, part of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, will leverage emerging technologies in genomics, digital health, and data science to develop new approaches to monitor an individual's health and manage wellness, enabling the individualized treatment of patients.
The Harris Center is evaluating the utility of mobile devices to measure activity, stress, sleep, cognitive functioning, mood, and environmental exposures, and is using sequencing technology to develop DNA, microbiome, and immune system profiles for predictive models of wellness.
The Icahn School said that the Harris Center also will apply state-of-the-art analytics and machine learning to individualized metrics to produce actionable, data-driven insights into "key aspects of wellness."
Joel Dudley and Gregory Stock will co-direct the center. Dudley is the director of biomedical informatics and an assistant professor of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School, according to his LinkedIn page. Stock is a research professor in genetics and genomic sciences at the school.
"A number of research initiatives already underway at the Icahn Institute are focused on driving a greater understanding of health and wellness," Eric Schadt, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics at the Icahn School and founding director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, said in a statement. "The new Harris Center will accelerate this momentum toward developing novel tools and approaches enabling precision wellness."