A team of Vanderbilt University Medical Center scientists are closer to understanding why COX-2 inhibitors — drugs that relieve arthritis pain and inflammation without the gastrointestinal side effects of other painkillers — cause heart problems in some patients. Now

Reduced-nicotine cigarettes were beneficial in reducing nicotine exposure and dependence, and also the number of cigarettes smoked per day, when compared with standard-nicotine cigarettes in a six-week study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

To most effectively use electronic health records for research, investigators should query multiple components of the record to identify patients with specific diseases.

Vanderbilt investigators have developed a framework for studying cellular responses that could be used to identify the agents driving a range of biological processes in health and disease.

Anti-cancer drugs are typically tested on one type of cancer at a time. But an international consortium of cancer investigators, including Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center (VICC) researchers, simultaneously tested an existing therapy in patients with several different forms of cancer that all exhibit the same tumor gene mutation.

Vanderbilt’s Ian Macara, Ph.D., has won an Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) — nearly $6.6 million over seven years — to support the “unusual potential” of his research, which seeks to understand and predict cancer cell “behavior.”

New findings show that fibrin, a protein that was thought to play a key role in fracture healing, is not required, shifting understanding of how fractures heal.