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.

Alexander Bick, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Genetic Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has been selected as the first VUMC Discovery Scholar in Health and Medicine.

Oxidative stress and toxic products called isolevuglandins in mitochondria play a role in endothelial dysfunction and hypertension — and getting rid of them with a special “scavenger” molecule has therapeutic potential.

In a large-scale study of electronic health records, Vanderbilt University Medical Center investigators have determined the prevalence of functional seizures and characterized comorbidities associated with them.

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.

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.