Health And Medicine

ASPIRE to Innovate Postdoctoral Fellow Catherine Leasure is the co-author of a comment article published this month in Nature Reviews Bioengineering addressing the pressing obstacle faced by modern drug development: worryingly poor success rates of pharmaceuticals progressing to clinical phases. Read More

Vanderbilt scientist Houra Merrikh led a team of researchers who discovered the first evolution-resistant chemical compound that prevents drug resistance development in bacteria. The compound is also a drug development platform that targets antimicrobial resistance during treatment of infections with antibiotics and evolution in general, Merrikh said. Read More

Ethan Lippmann, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering, has won a Collaborative Pairs Pilot Project Award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to create a more effective way for the immune system to fight against neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Read More

The lab of Professor of Biochemistry Fred Guengerich has proposed a paradigm shift in the understanding of a critical chemical reaction involved in sterol biosynthesis. Read More

The World Health Organization ranks antimicrobial resistance as one of the top ten global health risks. Vanderbilt researchers led by Houra Merrikh identified the first anti-evolution compound that targets AMR during treatment of infections with antibiotics. Read More

Led by Terunaga Nakagawa, an international collaboration describes for the first time the fundamental mechanism underpinning cellular processes that lead to learning and memory. Read More

An international genetic study using multiancestry biobanks has identified novel genetic locations associated with primary open-angle glaucoma, the most common type of glaucoma and the leading cause of irreversible blindness globally. Read More

An analysis of genomic data from nearly 250,000 participants in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program has identified more than 275 million previously unreported genetic variations, nearly 4 million of which have potential health consequences. Read More

WATCH: See how Ph.D. candidate Kaitlyn Browning wants to fight miscommunication and misinformation around science. Read More

A multidisciplinary research team at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center has discovered a new way to kill a tumor by disrupting its acidic “microenvironment” without harming normal tissue. Read More

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have identified Rac1, a molecular switch that regulates the actin cytoskeleton of epithelial cells in the collecting ducts, as a driver of post-obstructive kidney repair. Read More

Join the next Lab-to-Table conversation, “Picturing Progress: Representation in Scientific Art” on Feb. 20 at 11:00 a.m. Read More

Combining deep mutagenesis and cryo-EM reveals new conformational state of a protein responsible for high-speed DNA replication. The research builds on growing theories of molecular evolution. Read More

A study by Vanderbilt researchers has revealed how metabolic changes spurred by fatty acids contribute to the transformation of cells into abnormal versions of themselves that are the precursors to stomach cancer. Read More

By mapping brain activity in three dimensions, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have achieved a more detailed picture of how the brain changes with age. Read More

Mohammed AlQuraishi, assistant professor at Columbia University, will give an Apex Lecture on Monday, Jan. 29, at 12:00 p.m. CT in 214 Light Hall. His talk, “The State of Protein Structure Prediction and Friends,” is hosted by the School of Medicine Basic Sciences and co-sponsored by the Center for Applied AI in Protein Dynamics. Read More

Avenir Award funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse recognizes research that represents “the future of addiction science.” Brown’s research is creating an AI-experiment feedback loop that will help optimize painkilling drugs to be less addictive. Read More

Throughout the brain’s cortex, neurons are arranged in six distinctive layers, which can be readily seen with a microscope. André Bastos, assistant professor of psychology, is senior author on a study published in Nature Neuroscience detailing that these layers also show distinct patterns of electrical activity, which are consistent over many brain regions and across several animal species, including humans. Read More

A multidisciplinary group of investigators from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Pennsylvania received a $3.2 million grant to develop novel brain network-based measures to guide surgical decisions and improve outcomes in the field of epilepsy surgery. Read More

Katherine Hartmann, MD, PhD, Vice President for Research Integration for Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has been named director of the University of Kentucky (UK) Center for Clinical and Translational Science. Read More