NEW YORK, NY – January 9, 2017 –– The Mount Sinai Health System has announced the creation of the Mount Sinai/New York Eye and Ear (NYEE) Eye and Vision Research Institute. The Institute is the first of its kind in the New York City metropolitan region, and will expand Mount Sinai’s eye and vision research portfolio.

Bringing together eye and vision researchers from The Mount Sinai Hospital and NYEE, the new Institute will foster collaborations between faculty at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) and academic departments throughout the Mount Sinai Health System to maximize their collective efforts.

The Mount Sinai/NYEE Eye and Vision Research Institute will combine expertise from other fields of medicine to find breakthrough treatments and cures for eye conditions and disease, and will further research that can preserve vision and/or reverse blindness. Planned areas of research expansion include stem cell and regenerative biology of the visual system, ocular imaging, and genetics and genomics of eye disease. Investigators from other Mount Sinai institutes such as The Friedman Brain Institute, the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, and The Black Family Stem Cell Institute will provide critical insights to catalyze these advancements.
“New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai is on the forefront of clinical research in ophthalmology, and the creation of this Institute will further advance eye and vision research by capitalizing on Mount Sinai’s basic science and translational research strengths,” said James C. Tsai, MD, MBA, Delafield-Rodgers Professor and System Chair, Department of Ophthalmology, Mount Sinai Health System, and President, NYEE. “We look forward to collaborating with these institutes and benefiting from the expertise of their faculty to leverage our own strengths since not all research breakthroughs in vision science emanate from ophthalmology alone.”

Douglas A. Jabs, MD, MBA, Professor of Ophthalmology and Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai, and Director, Uveitis Division, The Mount Sinai Hospital, is the inaugural Director of the Institute. An internationally recognized clinician-scientist, Dr. Jabs has held continuous National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for more than 30 years. His personal research portfolio includes more than 20 years of bench immunology research, translational research in the area of viral drug resistance, and clinical research in the fields of AIDS, cytomegalovirus retinitis, and uveitis. Dr. Jabs has chaired numerous NIH-funded, multicenter, national and international clinical trials, including the Multicenter Uveitis Steroid Treatment (MUST) Trial and the Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS (SOCA), and is an internationally recognized expert in research methodology. He has authored over 300 original articles and 48 book chapters.

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