New technologies are accelerating breakthroughs in the basic biomedical sciences, advancing new and more precise therapeutic interventions, and leading to unprecedented gains in human health and well-being. Nowhere is this more critical than in precision medicine, which integrates the fundamental complexity of biological systems (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and systems analysis), data science and analytics, and engineering science and technologies to provide more accurate and precise treatment modalities to patients. The more complex the disease, the more distinct are the number of disease variations even to the level of the individual patient. This increasing complexity, together with the need for a high degree of accuracy, precision, and computation, requires skills that lie at the heart of engineering and engineering science.

The Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM) sits at the interface of biological and engineering sciences with clinical translation (Figure 1). The center builds on a wealth of enabling and multiscale technologies pioneered by researchers at Mount Sinai and Rensselaer at the nexus of medicine, engineering, and data analytics/artificial intelligence. This confluence of scientific and technological expertise is being targeted toward specific translational applications, including minimally invasive control and regulation of neural circuity, engineering the immune system to treat cancer and infectious disease, and on-demand personalized tissue repair and regeneration. This research requires a co-location of engineering with biomedical science and an undergirding clinical enterprise, leading to both basic understanding of disease mechanisms and opportunities for therapeutic interventions and improvement in clinical care.