Members of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Canby Robinson Society recently joined CEO and President Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, and his wife, Melinda, at Cheekwood Botanic Hall for the Spring Donor Celebration, an annual event honoring donors for their loyal support.
In addition to members of the Canby Robinson Society, those in attendance included members of VUMC’s board of directors, the advisory boards of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and the Vanderbilt Eye Institute as well as members of the Canby Robinson Legacy Circle and the Ike and Ann Robinson Society.
“This is a time we set aside to honor our most generous supporters and community members,” Balser said. “Your backing is fundamental as we work to advance scientific discovery and train the health care leaders of tomorrow, all with a vision of making health care personal — here in Nashville and all across the U.S.”
Jennifer Pietenpol, PhD, Chief Scientific and Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President for Research for VUMC, introduced the evening’s topic: “Unlocking the Power of Your DNA: Leading Medicine Into the Future.”
“Central to our mission at VUMC is providing personalized medicine which means different things to different people,” said Pietenpol, holder of the Brock Family Directorship in Career Development. “For some, personalized medicine means the individual interactions between clinicians and their patients. For others, it means making discoveries using a patient’s DNA. And for others still, it means staying current on the tools, like artificial intelligence (AI), that can help make health care better for everyone.”
Pietenpol told the group how VUMC introduced the first fully integrated electronic health record in a major health system 23 years ago, an early investment that laid the foundation for BioVU, a collection of DNA samples gathered from patients with their consent and linked to their longitudinal health record. It has now grown to contain over 325,000 samples. “No other DNA biobank in the world has the depth and breadth of clinical information linked to it.”
Six years ago, VUMC launched Nashville Biosciences, now called NashBio, to help extend the Medical Center’s BioVU capabilities, then formed the Alliance for Genomic Discovery to collaborate with leading pharmaceutical companies to whole genome sequence all the DNA samples in the BioVU biobank.
“In a nutshell, it means that the future discoveries we can make using this DNA sequence data will be limitless,” Pietenpol said.
The evening began with a video featuring Trish and Jim Munro, who have made a planned gift in support of the Vanderbilt Memory and Alzheimer’s Center, followed by a panel discussion, moderated by John Seigenthaler who spent 11 years as an anchor and correspondent for NBC News and is a managing partner with FINN Partners in Nashville.
The panel included:
- Jennifer “Piper” Below, PhD, professor of Medicine and a genetics expert who leverages BioVU and other large-scale datasets to develop new strategies to identify genetic and familial risk factors for a wide range of diseases. Below holds the Robert A. Goodwin, Jr., Directorship in Medicine.
- Ravi Shah, MD, an associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine and a physician scientist specializing in the intersection between metabolic health and disease. Shah is the Gottlieb C. Friesinger II Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine.
- Alexander Bick, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Genetic Medicine whose work has advanced the understanding of the genetic basis for cardiovascular and aging diseases.
- Ben Ho Park, MD, PhD, Benjamin F. Byrd Jr. Professor of Oncology and director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, a breast cancer physician-scientist and an expert in precision oncology.
- Peter Embí, MD, MS, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at VUMC, an expert in applying artificial intelligence to health care. Embi holds the Directorship in Biomedical Informatics.
Below said she has been able to explore disease traits and measures of health and diseases longitudinally through the BioVU biobank in ways that she could not have done elsewhere.
“It was transformative for my career,” she said, describing how, with VUMC’s resources, her lab developed a tool to help identify carriers of a rare mutation that can result in sudden cardiac death. “Our hope (in the future) is that we could deploy this broadscale in medical records as an opportunity to save lives,” Below said.
Shah spoke about how diet, exercise, stress and sleep have all had an impact on weight and weight-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, heart disease and diabetes. There has been a great deal of publicity about Ozempic, he said, and “its cousins,” similar drugs that will be offered to a broader sector of the community in the future.
“Ozempic has had an undeniable impact in the way we think about and treat obesity, but access has a been a real problem,” he said.
Bick, who played a key role in gathering genomic data from 1 million people through the National Institutes of Health All of Us research program, compared genomics to a crystal ball. “It’s a predictor. It’s not your destiny, but it certainly tells you what health risks are individual to you.”
Park talked about DNA being the “blueprint of who we are,” and cancer being “a disease of DNA gone bad.” Vanderbilt-Ingram is on the forefront of creating personalized therapies for every patient with cancer, he said. “When you think about it, if every DNA is a little different, then every cancer is also going to be different.”
Embí told the group that it’s a “very exciting time” in health care as AI is becoming more widely used. It is helping accelerate diagnostic odysseys and can be applied to the vast datasets available at VUMC and used to identify new targets and help discover new therapies.
“AI is evolving to become another member of our team…We have to do it responsibly,” he said. “Physicians and health systems that use AI the right way are going to be the ones who take better care of people,” he said. “Our task is to create the world where that is real.”
Suzanne Petrey attended the event in recognition of the support she and her husband, Clay Petrey, provide to Vanderbilt-Ingram and other areas of VUMC.
“As longtime Nashvillians, we’ve always been impressed by the Medical Center,” she said. “But this year we’ve seen it from the inside — I’m so thankful for the excellent care I received during an unexpected hospital stay, rehabilitation and then at home.”
