Research

Disrupting the action of glucagon — a pancreatic hormone that works to raise blood glucose — restores functional insulin-producing cells in mouse models of type 1 diabetes and may be a promising treatment strategy. Read More

Seth Bordenstein, Centennial Professor of Biological Sciences and director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Initiative, has been elected to fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. Read More

Allison Schachter, an associate professor of Jewish studies, English, and Russian and East European studies, developed a new theory about the role of women who made lasting and meaningful contributions to Jewish culture and history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Read More

A team led by Vanderbilt engineers has achieved the ability to transmit two different types of optical signals across a single chip at the same time. The breakthrough heralds a potentially dramatic increase in the volume of data a silicon chip can transmit over any period of time. With this project, the research team moved... Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is the busiest cochlear implant center in the U.S., performing more than 300 implant surgeries each year. A key driver is close collaboration among engineers, surgeons, audiologists, speech scientists and other experts. This interdisciplinary, trans-institutional work has enabled a truly customized approach for each patient. Research teams have developed image-guided surgery for... Read More

The Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering is an interdisciplinary, trans-institutional structure designed to facilitate interactions and exchanges between engineers and physicians. Engineering expertise includes modeling, robotics, imaging, image processing and analysis, devices, system integration, and instrumentation. A significant VISE clinical application has been the development of minimally invasive,… Read More

Blythe Corbett, PhD, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and investigator with the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, recently led a study which found that on average, females with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experienced the onset of puberty 9.5 months earlier than their peers. Read More

Mukesh Jain, MD, vice dean for Academic Affairs and Medical Sciences and professor of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, will discuss the discovery of aging-related disease genes and pathways during the next web-based Discovery Lecture. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers have linked bone-related complications of severely injured patients — findings that could help minimize these complications. Read More

In patients with glioblastoma brain tumors, features detected on MRIs at diagnosis were associated with survival, Vanderbilt Medical Center investigators found. Read More

Sabine Fuhrmann and colleagues have discovered a novel underlying cause of coloboma — a birth defect that causes missing tissue in the eye and accounts for up to 10% of childhood blindness. Read More

Genetic variation that impacts glucose- and insulin-related signaling affects responses to type 2 diabetes treatments and warrants further study. Read More

Laboratory and administrative personnel at Vanderbilt University Medical Center were honored last week for research excellence during the 17th annual Research Staff Awards, held virtually this year because of the pandemic. Read More

Valeria Reyes Ruiz, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology, has been selected as a 2020 Hanna Gray Fellow by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Read More

A Vanderbilt research team has received a $2 million National Institutes of Health grant to further develop a needle-size robotic surgery system with real-time MRI guidance for drug resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Such a procedure has the potential to reduce or eliminate seizures using a minimally invasive approach over the current standard of care,... Read More

Delirium, a form of acute brain dysfunction, is widespread in critically ill patients in lower resourced hospitals, and the duration of delirium predicted both mortality and disability at six months after discharge, according to a study published in PLOS ONE. Read More

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and scientific director of the Precision Phenotyping Core at the Center for Precision Medicine, has been awarded a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue development of high-throughput software for quickly identifying traits of interest, or phenotypes, in electronic health records (EHRs). Read More

Retrieval of clearer, more complete information from the EHR could go a long way toward improving predictive models of who will next be at risk of suicide, thereby improving care for patients with suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Read More

Researchers at the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering have developed a minuscule robot that could revolutionize surgical procedures for treating prostate cancer, which affects one in nine men in the United States. Using a lifelike model, the team demonstrated that the surgical robot could not only remove the prostate gland and tissues through the... Read More

A noninvasive, quantitative MRI method could be used after surgical repair of traumatic peripheral nerve injury to help clinicians make decisions about whether additional surgical interventions are needed. Read More