Icahn Institute partners in $6.5 million NIH award to advance precision medicine | EurekAlert! Science News

"The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have awarded $6.5 million to a consortium that includes the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the University of Washington, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand, to establish the Center for Reproducible Biomedical Modeling. The multi-institution biomedical technology resource center will accelerate the development of predictive models of biological systems to guide precision medicine and bioengineering and provide much-needed model building resources to the research community. Icahn Institute Assistant Professor Jonathan Karr, PhD, will direct the consortium's effort to develop computational tools for building reproducible models. Making significant advances in precision medicine and bioengineering requires detailed knowledge of biological entities, such as cells. Computer models of biological systems that can predict phenotype from genotype can help scientists understand the molecular basis of behavior, help clinicians personalize therapy, and help bioengineers design microorganisms for a wide range of applications. However, there remain limitations to building such predictive models, including the lack of data and tools needed to carry out modeling systematically and scalably and the lack of comprehensible, reusable, and reproducible models...."