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.

Eric Gamazon, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine, has been awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to develop novel computational tools that integrate functional genomic data and electronic health records.

New findings demonstrate how genetic variations in the receptor that binds SARS-CoV-2 impact virus recognition and infectivity and offer insights to COVID-19 susceptibility and treatment.

A computational technique that combines the effect of multiple genomic variants has the potential to identify high-risk individuals for cancer prevention.

With the aid of a $75 million, five-year grant renewal, the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network (eMERGE) will venture beyond its current focus on monogenic disease to scoring research participants’ relative risk for complex heritable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and type 2 diabetes.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center investigators have used high-throughput robotic technology to rapidly study and classify variations in a gene linked to heart rhythm disorders and cardiac conditions.

Electronic health records and biobanks can be effectively combined to detect and study Mendelian diseases such as cystic fibrosis.