The 3rd Annual Translational Medicine Symposium

The Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology at Mount Sinai invites you to the 3rd Annual Translational Medicine Symposium, a morning of research spanning cancer, neuroscience, hematology, endocrinology, and kidney disease. The program brings together investigators from Mount Sinai, Rockefeller University, Yale School of Medicine, and Columbia University to share how discoveries in the lab are moving toward the clinic. Following introductory comments from Institute Director Mone Zaidi, MD, PhD, the morning opens with a Keynote Lecture by Aaron Ciechanover, MD, of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology. Dr. Ciechanover was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation, the process cells use to tag unwanted proteins and break them down. The discovery reshaped our understanding of how cells regulate themselves and opened new avenues for treating cancer and other diseases. The first session continues with: HuiHui Li, PhD, Co-Director of the Institute’s Hematology Research Program, studies new therapies for myeloproliferative neoplasms, blood cancers that start in malignant stem cells in the bone marrow. She will discuss repurposing the antibiotic linezolid as a potential treatment for polycythemia vera.Daria Lizneva, MD, PhD, Director of the Institute’s Reproductive Biology Research Program, studies how luteinizing hormone, follicle-stimulating hormone, and oxytocin affect body fat, metabolism, and mood. She will discuss how genetic variation in the luteinizing hormone receptor shapes body composition in humans.Scott Russo, PhD, Chair of the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience and Leon Levy Director of the Brain-Body Research Institute at Mount Sinai, studies how chronic stress reshapes the brain’s reward circuits and how immune signals from the body influence mood. His work helped pave the way for a clinical trial in treatment-resistant depression.After a coffee break, the second session features: Sohail Tavazoie, MD, PhD, Leon Hess Professor and Senior Attending Physician at Rockefeller University, leads a lab that studies how cancer cells spread, seed new tumors, and evade the immune system. Two metastasis-targeting therapies that came out of his work have entered clinical trials.Samir Zaidi, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Medical Oncology) and Steven Sherwin Investigator at Yale School of Medicine, is a genitourinary oncologist at Smilow Cancer Hospital. His lab studies how cancer cells change identity, spread, and interact with surrounding tissue to resist treatment, focusing on how prostate cancer turns into aggressive neuroendocrine tumors. He received an AACR Trailblazer Cancer Research Grant for this work.Erin Flaherty, PhD, Research Scholar at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, will soon join the Institute as an Assistant Professor to launch its Neurobiology of Disease Research Program. Her past research has used neurons grown from patients’ stem cells to study how genetic risk factors for psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia affect brain cell function.Ilse Daehn, PhD, Director of the Institute’s Renal Health Research Program, studies how cells in the kidney’s filtering units communicate in the early, potentially reversible stages of chronic kidney disease. Her team is also identifying genetic risk factors and urine biomarkers to detect diabetic kidney disease early.Please join us on Wednesday, November 18, from 9:00 am to 1:30 pm in the Goldwurm Auditorium at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The symposium is held in tandem with the afternoon Award Ceremony and Distinguished Lecture honoring Napoleone Ferrara, MD, the 2026 Yergin Family International Prize laureate, beginning at 3:00 pm.