Vanderbilt Basic Sciences

Vanderbilt University faculty members have been elected this year to membership in the National Academy of Medicine, a prestigious, non-governmental organization that advises the nation and the world on important aspects of medical science, health care and public health. Monteggia was recruited to Vanderbilt in 2018 to… Read More

In the mammalian brain, the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter is called GABA. The gene SLC6A1 encodes the GABA transporter GAT1, and in Neurobiology of Disease, Felicia Mermer, Sarah Poliquin, Jing-Qiong Kang, MD, PhD, and colleagues report experiments — in silico, in vitro and in mice-o… Read More

James Crowe Jr., MD, director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received the Building the Foundation Award from Research!America, a national biomedical research advocacy organization, for his team’s role in developing human monoclonal antibodies and vaccine candidates against COVID-19. The award, which was announced Oct. 6,… Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has been awarded a nearly $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to construct a state-of-the-art BioSafety Level 3 (BSL3) facility for research involving the COVID-19 virus, anthrax and other dangerous microorganisms. VUMC currently has two BSL3 labs, but they are small, outdated and… Read More

Dr. Ethan Lee, professor of cell and developmental biology and pharmacology, has been named a 2022 Innovation Fund investigator by The Pew Charitable Trusts. As a vote of confidence in the power of collaborative, interdisciplinary research, Pew created the Innovation Fund in 2017 to encourage partnerships among alumni of Pew’s  biomedical programs. Combining… Read More

Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Emily Hodges and graduate student Tyler Hansen used a blended approach to create a new, multi-omic method to identify and characterize gene regulatory elements—non-coding DNA sequences that control gene expression—in the human genome. The new technique, ATAC-STARR-seq, was published in Genome Research. During… Read More

One in 100 people have genetic variations that can cause potentially life-threatening heart conditions, including high cholesterol (lipid disorders), heart muscle disease (cardiomyopathies), and abnormal heart rhythms (arrhythmias). Yet the functional impact of most of these cardiovascular genetic variants — whether they disrupt normal function or are harmless — is… Read More

The Stanley Cohen Innovation Fund provides a yearly award to support innovative and groundbreaking research at Vanderbilt University. This year, after a competitive application process, Emily Hodges, assistant professor of biochemistry, and Terunaga Nakagawa, associate professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, were named as the 2022 recipients. Read More

Obesity and overnutrition increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes through several mechanisms. One of these is through loss of the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreatic islet.  Wenbiao Chen, PhD, and colleagues previously have shown that overnutrition stressed the endoplasmic reticulum, the part of the beta… Read More

John Wilson, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Vanderbilt University, has received a $3 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop technology that seeks to boost a person’s immune system to better fight cancer. Wilson is the Principal Investigator of the five-year grant. He specializes in… Read More