Research, News & Discoveries

By Emily Overway Thanks to a partnership between the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences, the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, and the Office of the Provost, all graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, staff, and primary faculty in Basic Sciences will gain access to BioRender Premium… Read More

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) — the most common form of lupus — is an autoimmune disease that causes widespread inflammation and tissue damage. David Harrison, MD, and colleagues have now described a new mechanism responsible for SLE.  They found that in humans with SLE and in two… Read More

An essential component of a graduate student’s training is the first-year coursework, which fosters the skills needed to be an independent researcher, such as critical literature analysis, the ability to understand the current state of a given field, and hypothesis generation. In the spring of 2020, a committee comprising faculty… Read More

Alyssa Hasty (associate dean for faculty, School of Medicine Basic Sciences), Claudia Paz (chief business officer, School of Medicine Basic Sciences), Tiffany Lawrence Givens (director of human resources, Basic Sciences Dean’s Office, School of Medicine), and Kimberly D. Turner (assistant dean of administrative operations, School of Medicine Basic Sciences) have been named to… Read More

A long-acting antibody combination discovered at Vanderbilt University Medical Center that protects against COVID-19 in high-risk individuals, and which was optimized and developed by the global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, has received a gold medal in the 2022 R&D 100 awards program announced Aug. 22 by R&D World Magazine. Now… Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has opened a state-of-the-art automated biobanking system that can store as many as 10 million biospecimens, including blood and body fluids, tissue, and genetic and protein material, at temperatures down to minus 80 degrees Celsius. The “BioStore” was purchased from its manufacturer, Massachusetts-based Azenta Life… Read More

The growth of epithelial ovarian cancer, one of the most lethal malignancies, is associated with the presence of tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs), white blood cells that can block the anti-cancer activity of the immune system and immunotherapy. Fortunately, TAMs can be “repolarized,” converted from immunosuppressive tumor-promoters to inflammatory tumor-fighters. Now,… Read More

Bacteria in our bodies bind to various host cell surface receptors, which determines where the bacteria live and how they behave. These receptors, made up of chains of sugar molecules called glycans, are more than meets the eye. Cells existing within progressive disease states like cancer can have an increased… Read More

Spend a day in the Tyska lab with graduate student Caroline Cencer via this TikTok video! @CarolineCencer @TyskaLabActual… Read More

Vanderbilt researchers have developed an active machine learning approach to predict the effects of tumor variants of unknown significance, or VUS, on sensitivity to chemotherapy. VUS, mutated bits of DNA with unknown impacts on cancer risk, are constantly being identified. The growing number of rare VUS makes it imperative for… Read More