featured research

Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and Associate Professor of Medicine Dr. William Fissell IV is making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an artificial implantable kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by a patient’s own heart.

Vanderbilt engineers have modified a cotton candy machine to create complex microfluidic networks that mimic the capillary system in living tissue and have demonstrated that these networks can keep cells alive and functioning in an artificial three-dimensional matrix.

In a first-of-its-kind study of veterans and civilians, researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center found that one in 10 patients is at risk of having a new post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following their time in the intensive care unit (ICU).

With discoveries ranging from the origins of consciousness to the end of the universe, 2015 was a year of incredibly diverse research at Vanderbilt University.

A Vanderbilt neurosurgeon is looking to recruit patients with paraplegia to investigate whether intraspinal microstimulation technology can restore complex body movements.

Vanderbilt investigators have generated a “parts list” for the molecular machinery that duplicates DNA each time a cell divides. The research has implications for cancer therapies that target components of this machinery.

Children with autism who participated in a 10-week, 40-hour, theatre-based program showed significant differences in social ability compared to a group of children with autism who did not participate, according to a Vanderbilt study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.