CMR Seminar Series: Dr. Mone Zaidi

Dr. Mone Zaidi graduated in medicine from King George’s Medical College, India, and trained clinically at the Hammersmith Hospital, London, under the tutelage of Professor Iain MacIntyre, FRS, who discovered calcitonin. After obtaining a PhD and MD from the University of London, Dr. Zaidi held faculty appointments for over 8 years, before he was recruited to Mount Sinai School of Medicine as Professor of Medicine and Founding Director of The Mount Sinai Bone Program. He is now Director of Mount Sinai’s Center for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology and was recently appointed as Deputy Editor for eLife where he is responsible for the medicine section of the journal.

Dr. Zaidi has made groundbreaking discoveries on mechanisms of skeletal homeostasis in health and disease. These studies, spanning over 30 years, included the first description of calcium sensing in the osteoclast and the discovery that locally released nitric oxide acts to suppress bone cells. In 2003, Zaidi’s group published the first evidence for a pituitary–bone axis, a breakthrough in physiology in which pituitary hormones could affect the skeleton directly. In recent groundbreaking papers in Nature, he found that inhibiting FSH not only increased bone mass, but also reduced body fat and neurodegeneration--in essence, laying a firm foundation for a single anti-FSH agent to treat osteoporosis, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease.

The corpus of work relating FSH to body fat was selected by Nature Medicine as one of eight “Notable Advances” in biomedicine for 2017 and was editorialized in the New York Times. Constituting a total of over 450 publications in journals, including Cell, Nature and PNAS, Zaidi’s research has been funded continuously by the NIH. He has also Chaired multiple Study Sections for the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs He was elected to the Association of American Physicians, Interurban Clinical Club of which he is President, the Practitioners’ Society (the oldest medical society in the U.S.) and the Association of Professors of Medicine. Dr. Zaidi was made Master of the American College of Physicians, received the Harrington Scholar–Innovator Award, was elected as Fellow of the American Association of Advancement of Science, and is recipient of three honorary doctorates. Further details are available at: https://profiles.mountsinai.org/mone-zaidi We will soon host Dr. Zaidi in August, to present at CMR Seminar Series. Time & venue details will be posted and emailed in future.