by Bill Snyder
Dan Roden, MD, Senior Vice President for Personalized Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has been awarded the 2019 Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Prize in Cardiovascular Sciences by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Heart and Vascular Center, Ohio State officials announced Nov. 18.
Awarded biennially, the Schottenstein Prize honors leaders in the cardiovascular sciences who have made extraordinary and sustained contributions to improving health care. Roden will receive the prize and a $100,000 honorarium during a ceremony on the Wexner Medical Center campus in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 20.
“I am deeply honored to have been nominated and selected for this very prestigious award,” said Roden, who holds the endowed Sam L. Clark, MD, PhD Chair in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. “I am especially grateful to the Schottenstein family for their continued support of the academic mission.
“This award also recognizes our institution’s long-standing commitment to the ideas around personalized medicine, and to the many people with whom I have been privileged to work over my time here,” he added.
Established by a $2 million endowment from humanitarian philanthropists and longtime OSU supporters Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein, the prize is chartered to The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Heart and Vascular Center.
A native of Montreal, Canada, Roden received his medical degree from McGill University. After completing residency training in internal medicine in Montreal, he arrived at Vanderbilt in 1978 as a research fellow in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and later as a fellow in cardiology.
Since joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1981, Roden has become internationally recognized for his studies of the mechanisms and treatment of abnormal heart rhythms and variability in drug response. One major interest has been pharmacogenomics — and especially the role genetic variations play in adverse drug reactions such as drug-induced arrhythmias.
Roden directed the Division of Clinical Pharmacology from 1992 to 2004 when he became founding director of the Oates Institute for Experimental Therapeutics.
A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he is professor of Medicine, Biomedical Informatics and Pharmacology and the author of more than 700 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Roden is a leader in VUMC’s PREDICT project (Pharmacogenomic Resource for Enhanced Decisions in Care and Treatment), which since 2010 has applied genomic testing to drug prescribing in an effort to avoid adverse drug reactions.
He co-directs the Improving Prediction of Drug Action program, part of the Pharmacogenetics Research Network funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is co-principal investigator for the VUMC site of the NIH Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network and is principal investigator for the medical center’s DNA databank, BioVU.
“Dr. Roden is a pioneer in the field of personalized medicine,” said Thomas Ryan, MD, MBA, director of the Heart and Vascular Center and executive director of the Richard M. Ross Heart Hospital at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
“Because of Dr. Roden’s leadership in this growing field, medical experts are now custom-treating patients based on their genetic makeup,” Ryan said. “The result is better treatment for the patient and earlier diagnosis of disease.”
