It’s a crisp February morning and Ken Browning, just a few days short of his retirement, let his gaze travel down the Medical Center plaza. From where he stood, just outside Medical Center North, a three-block long canyon of buildings stretches south and forms the heart of Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

When Bruce Beyer, MD, was a teenager, his grandmother stitched a needlepoint scene of a deer by a woodland stream that she gave him with explicit instructions to “hang it in his doctor’s office.”

Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently received a $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to improve outcomes for children with significant hearing loss by providing individualized, prescription-like programming for their cochlear implants.

An international team involving Vanderbilt researchers has discovered that a new “checkpoint” protein on immune system cells is active in tumors, and that blocking it — in combination with other treatments — is a successful therapeutic approach in mouse models of cancer.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center employees and guests gathered in the sixth floor atrium of the Critical Care Tower on Feb. 14 to dedicate “The Gift of Life,” a metal sculpture memorializing the final, selfless act of VUMC’s organ donors and their families.

Following a massive initiative that changed how every lab sample is labeled and how those samples are matched to patients, critical results that guide patient care at Vanderbilt University Medical Center are returning to health care teams in about half the time it once took.

Using sophisticated gene sequencing and computing techniques, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the San Diego Supercomputer Center have achieved a first-of-its-kind glimpse into how the body’s immune system gears up to fight off infection.