As she looks back on her 40-plus year career, what surprises Nancy Cox, PhD, an internationally known geneticist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is how much progress has been made, and yet how much more there is to learn about the role genetic variation plays in human disease.

Reporting Nov. 6 in Cell Reports Medicine, Ivelin Georgiev, PhD, and colleagues demonstrated that antibodies isolated from children’s blood samples displayed high levels of neutralization and potency against variants of the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, even when the children had not previously been exposed to or vaccinated against those variants.

In the largest study of its kind, researchers at Vanderbilt have identified unexpected alterations in the exocrine tissues of the pancreas that occur in the two major forms of diabetes, and with aging and obesity.

"You can see and hear everything around you, but you appear dead. It is like being locked in a glass coffin.”

Accounting for genetic variability in biomarkers not associated with cancer risk could avoid unnecessary diagnostic procedures, Vanderbilt researchers found.

Kimryn Rathmell, MD, PhD, chair of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has received the Paragon Award for Research Excellence from the Doris Duke Foundation.