Dan Roden, MD, Senior Vice President for Personalized Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, received the Oscar B. Hunter Career Award in Therapeutics last week at the virtual annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics.

Postoperative atrial fibrillation (PoAF), a form of arrhythmia, complicates 20-40% of cardiac surgical procedures and 10–20% of non-cardiac thoracic operations, cropping up two to four days after surgery to pose risk of stroke, heart attack, mortality, longer hospital stays and greater cost.

A study by Vanderbilt researchers that analyzed both smoking history and genetic risk variants for lung cancer supports modifying current guidelines to include additional smokers for lung cancer screening.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and colleagues have identified genetic factors that increase the risk for developing pneumonia and its severe, life-threatening consequences.

Vanderbilt Genetics Institute investigators have added a new method to the computational genetics toolbox. Their approach, described in the journal Nature Genetics, integrates vast genomics datasets to predict gene expression and facilitate discovery of genetic mechanisms underlying human diseases.

Studies using large DNA biobanks revealed genetic variants associated with penicillin allergy, the most common type of drug-induced allergic reaction.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill have been awarded $500,000 by Google’s philanthropy, Google.org, to study how COVID-19 alters gene expression in some people in ways that may be linked to their risk of severe illness and death.