The Mark Lebwohl Center for Neuroinflammation and Sensation opened in January 2022 and is advancing multidisciplinary research, bringing together skin biology, immunology, and neuroscience. The state-of-the-art research center provides world-class clinical care for patients with chronic itch and other sensory disorders. The ultimate goal is to bring therapeutic innovations through fundamental new science and cutting-edge clinical trials to address significant unmet sensory and neuroinflammatory disorders.
Located at 787 11th Avenue in New York, the Lebwohl Center is part of the growing corridor of medical and biotechnology research in Midtown on the west side of Manhattan. Mount Sinai has a major presence there with its new Discovery and Innovation Center, which is serving as a cornerstone of life science advancements nationwide.
“The Lebwohl Center is at the forefront of a new area of biology and medicine, the field of neuroimmunology. This field is a completely uncharted frontier. When we think about the five senses, they are sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but the fundamental premise of the Center is that there are probably thousands of senses that we have only started to realize exist,” says Brian S. Kim, MD, MTR, FAAD, Vice Chair of Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director of the Center. How we sense inflammation and itch, the most common symptoms in dermatology, along with related areas, is being explored at the Lebwohl Center.
Dr. Kim is joined by recent recruits Hongzhen Hu, PhD, MS, Scientific Director of the Lebwohl Center, Professor of Dermatology, and Neuroscience, and Michel Enamorado, PhD, Assistant Professor, Dermatology, who are building a team to explore how the immune system interacts with the nervous system in the biological domain. Drs. Hu and Enamorado bring expertise and major grant funding with the objective of increasing our research footprint.
The investment in the Lebwohl Center by our generous donors and Mount Sinai was quite visionary. That support foresaw the explosive growth in the new field of neuroimmunology, which has recently received validation from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation granting Mount Sinai $10 million over four years for the Allen Discovery Center (ADC) for Neuroimmune Interactions at Icahn Mount Sinai—New York’s first and the world’s fifth ADC. This new multidisciplinary research center, spearheaded by Dr. Kim, will bring together leading experts from Icahn Mount Sinai, Weill Cornell Medicine, NYU Langone Health, and Yale School of Medicine to study the intersection of immunology and neuroscience.
One of the ADC’s major initiatives is open science. The team will make things technologically and rapidly accessible, whether it’s data, technology, other research, animal resources, or intellectual resources. They will also interface with many scientists in the New York region and internationally to mobilize these efforts. “By making moonshot discoveries in science, we will be able to seed science and then medical innovation across the world,” says Dr. Kim.
Midtown West is an area where biotech meets academia meets investors. Mount Sinai has invested heavily in the new Discovery and Innovation Center, located in the same building as the Lebwohl Center and the ADC. We are proud to be part of this ecosystem, which is becoming a major biotech hub and an accelerator of scientific research.