Wei-Qi Wei

March 17, 2025

Where are all the Alzheimer’s drugs?

A new study will use innovative methods developed at VUMC to look for drugs already approved for other uses that could potentially be repurposed to treat Alzheimer’s.

By Paul Govern
August 13, 2024

$3.4 million research grant targets risk of heart attack, stroke

Making innovative use of observational data, researchers hope to gain new understanding of patient risk and identify existing drugs to lower risk.

By Paul Govern
June 11, 2024

2024 Chancellor Faculty Fellows selected

Each fellow holds the title for two years, receives $40,000 per year to support their work, and meets with their cohort to exchange ideas, build a broader intellectual community and engage in academic leadership development.

By Kathy Whitney
(iStock image)
April 25, 2024

AI shows promise for clinical phenotyping

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have demonstrated the potential for large language models like ChatGPT to help generate electronic health record phenotyping algorithms, a critical but time-consuming task in observational health research.

By Paul Govern
February 26, 2024

Study finds a role for AI in drug repurposing pipeline

Vanderbilt researchers are using artificial intelligence to search for existing drugs used for other problems that might help patients Alzheimer’s Disease.

By Paul Govern
September 8, 2022

PheWAS reveals post-COVID-19 diagnoses

Using a high-throughput informatics technique and electronic health records, Vanderbilt researchers found that COVID-19 survivors had an increased risk for more than 40 new diagnoses.

By Bill Snyder
January 20, 2022

New method enhances efforts to identify drug repurposing targets

Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have developed a new method for identifying drugs for the repurposing trials that can lead to new indications for drugs already in use.
By Paul Govern
September 17, 2021

Grant creates center for maternal, pediatric precision therapeutics

Vanderbilt University Medical Center has been awarded a five-year, $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to serve as a center of excellence for Maternal and Pediatric Precision in Therapeutics.
By Christina Echegaray
June 17, 2021

Drug allergy labels in medical records power searches for gene-drug associations

By Paul Govern
April 15, 2021

Team analyzed clinical notes to identify COVID symptoms

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities first had to identify and draw attention to common signs and symptoms of the disease.
By Paul Govern
February 11, 2021

Grant supports speedy sorting of health records by phenotype

Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and scientific director of the Precision Phenotyping Core at the Center for Precision Medicine, has been awarded a four-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (grant GM139891) to continue
By Paul Govern
December 17, 2020

COVID-associated delays for elective services studied

This spring in the U.S., there were widespread delays in elective health care procedures and screenings. Hospitals, in observance of federal guidelines, were, for a time, conserving beds and protective equipment in preparation for a surge in COVID-19 admissions. And, perhaps on a more prolonged basis, patients in many areas of the country stayed away due to anxiety over catching COVID-19 from other patients or their health care team.
By Paul Govern
October 29, 2020

New tool rapidly identifies health records for studies

Electronic health records (EHR) are increasingly a resource for biomedical discovery, and automated searches for records that reflect a phenotype of interest, typically a disease, are a common starting point.
By Paul Govern