Department Of Cell And Developmental Biology

Investigators are exploring the molecular mechanisms behind the association of chronic inflammation and colon cancer. Read More

Inflammation synergizes with a cell’s intrinsic genetic program to promote the development of pancreatic cancer. Read More

Microtubules, part of the cell's cytoskeleton, regulate the secretion of insulin, suggesting that they may be a new target for treating diabetes. Read More

Scott Baldwin and colleagues have discovered early signaling events during heart development, findings that could guide cell replacement therapies for heart disease. Read More

Basement membranes are important structural and functional components of tissues. New research provides insight into how they repair themselves. Read More

New findings may speed progress toward programming cells to rebuild damaged hearts more quickly. Read More

Craig Brooks and colleagues have identified a mechanism of kidney fibrosis progression, suggesting a potential new angle for treating chronic kidney disease. Read More

Ken Lau and Guoqiang Gu have identified a critical biomarker in determining how a pancreatic progenitor cell will develop. Read More

New research led by Rebecca Cook demonstrates that an antiviral receptor called RIG-I has potent immunogenic and therapeutic effects in breast cancer. Read More

Mukhtar Ahmed and colleagues say the methods they employed to understand the mechanisms by which exocysts--protein complexes essential to life--function have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of cell dynamics. Read More

Qi Liu, PhD, Ken Lau, PhD, and colleagues have developed a new tool, sc-UniFrac, to quantify diverse cell types in single-cell studies. Read More

Loss of a protein that regulates mitochondrial function can greatly increase the risk of a heart attack, report Eric Gamazon, Sandra Zinkel and graduate students Christie Salisbury-Ruf and Clinton Bertram in new research. Read More

A trans-institutional team of researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt University has received an $11 million Cancer Moonshot grant to build a single-cell resolution atlas to map out the routes that benign colonic polyps take to progress to colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer among both men and women in the United States. Read More

Research led by Matthew Tyska gives new insight into the formation of the lining of the gut that helps us absorb nutrients and guard against illness. Read More

New research by Andrea Page-McCaw shows that a membrane that wraps around most animal tissues can heal within 24 hours, but does leave a scar. Read More

Chronic inflammation is a predisposing condition for colorectal cancer, the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. Anna Means, Ph.D., and colleagues have now linked inflammation-driven carcinogenesis in the colon to loss of an important signaling protein called SMAD4. Read More

Vanderbilt scientists have developed a new process that can rapidly and inexpensively identify personalized cancer drugs derived from nature. Read More

The bacterium H. pylori is a leading cause of stomach cancer, and Vanderbilt researchers are studying how one of its toxins gets into cells. Read More

The spring Flexner Discovery Lecture series wraps up on Thursday, April 26, with a presentation by Terry Orr-Weaver, PhD, professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Read More

MCL-1 is a member of the BCL-2 family of proteins important for blocking apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Many types of cancer cells escape the body’s effort to kill them by overexpressing MCL-1. Read More