Division of Genetic Medicine

The expected course of a patient's cancer prognosis has traditionally been judged by its type, stage and microscopic aggressiveness, but patients with the same presentation can still have widely divergent outcomes. Researchers from Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center have discovered that differences in tumor mutation burden are a major reason for this divergence.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Lea Davis, PhD, and longtime colleagues Ekaterina (Katya) Khramtsova, PhD, and Barbara Stranger, PhD, are among seven authors of a paper published May 11 in the journal Cell that outlines “best practices” for evaluating the impact of both sex and gender on human health.

A transcontinental research effort led by scientists from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the University of Michigan has upended some long-standing assumptions about mutations — how often they occur, what causes them and what they do.

A machine learning method based on neural networks outperformed a mutational scanning model at identifying disease-causing mutations in an Alzheimer’s disease protein, suggesting the method could be useful for facilitating therapeutic design.

Polygenic risk scores — scores that reflect the influence of common genetic variants — could be used to predict the likelihood of developing chronic overlapping pain conditions and guide biomarker and targeted prevention efforts.

An international coalition of biomedical researchers co-led by Vanderbilt's Alexander Bick, MD, PhD, has determined a new way to measure the growth rate of precancerous clones of blood stem cells that one day could help doctors lower their patients’ risk of blood cancer.

Computational genetics tools have implicated inflammatory pathways in exfoliation syndrome, the most common cause of secondary glaucoma, which can result in blindness.