Now in its 17th year, the Aspirnaut pipeline offers a summer research program at VUMC primarily for rural and diverse high school and undergraduate students.

Tracy Frech, MD, MSCI, has been named to direct the division of Rheumatology and Immunology in the Department of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and will assume the new role Sept. 1.

The combination of genomics and metabolism identified a long-sought mitochondrial choline transporter.

Department of Medicine clinicians see patients in 19 counties across Middle Tennessee as well as the surrounding region. There were 86,096 outpatient visits for fiscal year 2024, an increase of more than 25,000 visits over fiscal year 2023.

The therapy, haploidentical bone marrow transplant with thiotepa and posttransplant cyclophosphamide, is as safe and more affordable than the recently FDA-approved myeloablative gene therapy and gene editing treatments.

The study was the largest ancestry-stratified, genetic estimation of the heritability of diabetic retinopathy conducted to date and included an unprecedented number of individuals of non-Hispanic African ancestry — more than 46,000.

This new entry to the field works in the background to provide real-time risk assessments, with no manual inputs from health care providers required.