Reporter July 8 2016

Patients, families and staff at Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt were treated to lunch recently at a food truck event provided by Chef Lucas Food, a nonprofit started by a Minneapolis, Minnesota, teen who is a Hodgkin’s Lymphoma survivor and food truck fanatic.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) has been chosen by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be the Data and Research Support Center for the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program, a landmark study of genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors affecting the health of a million or more people, federal officials have announced.

A cancer research consortium headed by investigators at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center and two other institutions have received $12 million in federal funding to help determine why African-American women die at a higher rate and have more aggressive breast cancer than white women.

Officials with Erlanger Health System and Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) announce a strategic affiliation agreement creating a collaborative relationship between the two institutions while Erlanger Health System is also joining the Vanderbilt Health Affiliated Network.

Many clinical trials are stopped prematurely because they fail to recruit enough study participants. Vanderbilt University Medical Center has received a five-year, $14 million grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health to address this.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Duke Clinical Research Institute have received a major federal grant to study how multisite clinical trials of new drugs and therapies in children and adults can be conducted more rapidly and efficiently.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced that it has selected Vanderbilt University Medical Center to participate in a care delivery model that supports and encourages higher quality, more coordinated cancer care. The Medicare arm of the Oncology Care Model includes more than 3,200 oncologists — about one-fifth of U.S. oncology specialists — and will involve approximately 155,000 Medicare beneficiaries nationwide.