Research

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

HIV-1, the virus that causes AIDS, exploits inositol phosphates in T cells to aid its own assembly and maturation — suggesting that targeting inositol phosphate binding could inhibit HIV-1 replication. Read More

Insight into the pathophysiology of an enigmatic and debilitating disease suggests new treatment approaches. Read More

A selenium transport protein produced in the colon may be a novel biomarker for assessing disease severity and cancer risk in patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Read More

A new method speeds the analysis of factors that control gene expression from days to minutes, allowing researchers to uncover new targets for cancer treatment. Read More

Vivian Gama, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, and Leon Bellan, associate professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, have won a $2.3 million, three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative. Vivian Gama Leon Bellan (Vanderbilt University) The researchers will be developing three-dimensional brain organoids and... Read More

Vivian Gama, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, and Leon Bellan, associate professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, have won a $2.3 million, three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative. Vivian Gama Leon Bellan (Vanderbilt University) The researchers will be developing three-dimensional brain organoids and... Read More

Sedative medications used in intensive care are associated with increased delirium, which is in turn connected with higher medical costs and greater risk of death and ICU-related dementia. Read More

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston have discovered what may be the Achilles’ heel of the coronavirus, a finding that may help close the door on COVID-19 and possibly head off future pandemics. Read More

Scientists are just beginning to understand the impact of diet on the gut microbiome and how this interaction affects human health, but baselines must first be established to yield answers. Read More

A rare tumor that causes facial weakness was found masquerading as a more common benign facial tumor. Read More

Nearly 40 School of Engineering faculty members have been named among the top 2 percent of 7 million working scientists in the world. More than 60 percent of the school’s full professors are in this elite group, based on a recent study by a Stanford University professor and his colleagues. The study combines several different... Read More

A blood stem cell protein plays a role in the initiation and progression of leukemia, Vanderbilt researchers have found. Read More

Vanderbilt researchers have received a National Cancer Institute grant to develop a novel, integrative approach to detect early signs of lung cancer. The four-year project builds on a related, recent study that established the value of using three separate measures—structural imaging, a protein marker and information available from electronic health records—to predict lung cancer in... Read More

Brain inflammation links genetic and acquired epilepsy — providing new clues about epilepsy development and pointing to potential treatments. Read More