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Five-year survival data for pembrolizumab patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer were presented June 1 at the 2019 ASCO Annual Meeting, May 31-June 4, in Chicago. The study results showed a marked improvement over 5-year survival rates in the pre-immunotherapy era, which averaged only 5.5%. Pembrolizumab increased the survival rate to 23.2% after five years in people with advanced non-small cell lung cancer who had not previously been treated with chemotherapy and to 15.5% in those who had been previously treated with chemotherapy. The KEYNOTE-001 is the longest follow-up study to date of people with advanced non-small cell lung cancer treated with pembrolizumab.

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Successful epilepsy surgery can improve brain connectivity similar to patterns seen in people without epilepsy, according to a new study published in the journal Neurosurgery.

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Patients with a form of congenital heart disease — having only one ventricle (pumping chamber) — are now living longer lives due to the successful surgical and medical treatments they receive as children.

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Bioimpedance spectroscopy (BIS) is better than a tape measure for assessing a woman’s risk for developing lymphedema, painful swelling in the arm after breast cancer surgery.

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A new technique to rehabilitate lungs that are too damaged to be considered for transplant could benefit an increasing population of patients with end-stage lung disease.

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A roadmap to create an implantable dialysis system that would allow patients to treat kidney failure at home has won researchers from Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), UC San Francisco (UCSF), and Silicon Kidney one of 15 cash prizes in the inaugural KidneyX’s Redesign Dialysis Phase I competition.

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The EOS X-ray imaging system uses ultra-low radiation doses (up to 50 times lower depending on the scan type) to capture 2-D and 3-D images. The scan, complete in about eight to 15 seconds, obtains an image of the body in an upright, load-bearing position, which is more representative of the body’s natural function.

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Mary Jo Gilmer studies the impact animals can have on children with life-threatening conditions. She recently received a grant from nonprofit Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI) for a pilot program investigating the health benefits of human-animal interactions (HAIs) in reducing suffering of children with cancer undergoing debilitating treatments.

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Scientists and patients from all over the world are gathering in Vancouver, Canada, on Friday and Saturday to discuss new discoveries and future direction in the treatment of Stevens-Johnson syndrome/toxic epidermal necrolysis (SJS/TEN), a drug-induced disease that has a mortality of up to 50%.

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Diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in Asia and has dramatically increased the risk of premature death, especially among women and middle-aged people, a multinational study led by Vanderbilt University researchers has found.

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Warm weather has arrived in Tennessee which means snakebite season is upon us. The venomous snakes native to our region are the pit vipers and consist of copperheads, cottonmouths/water moccasins, and various species of rattlesnakes. Their bites are rarely life-threatening but may require treatment with antivenin.

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Christine Seidman, MD, whose lab has identified the genetic causes of several human heart diseases including cardiomyopathy (potentially fatal enlargement of the heart) is the recipient of the 2019 Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science, officials at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) announced today.

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In January scientists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and colleagues in Boston, Seattle and St. Louis were given an audacious goal to develop — in 90 days — a protective antibody-based treatment that potentially will stop the spread of the Zika virus.

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The Department of Defense is providing $7 million to better understand how much and which components of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) are the most effective for young children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

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Prostate cancer patients in Nashville and Los Angeles are benefiting from a computer-based decision aid that implements the latest study results to tailor treatment options to an individual’s quality-of-life priorities.

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Tim Lowell of Hernando, Mississippi, received the first total artificial heart in the state of Tennessee when the cardiac surgery team at Vanderbilt Health placed the device in his chest on Sept. 26, 2018. The mechanical heart kept him alive for nearly three months until a matching human donor heart became available and he was transplanted on Dec. 16, 2018, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

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Leaders of Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) today announced plans to purchase Tennova Healthcare-Lebanon, a two-campus facility licensed for 245 beds, from subsidiaries of Community Health Systems, Inc. (CHS). A definitive agreement has been signed for the sale of the facility and related businesses, including physician clinic operations and outpatient services, to VUMC.

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A medicine currently being tested as a chemoprevention agent for multiple types of cancer has more than one trick in its bag when it comes to preventing stomach cancer, Vanderbilt researchers have discovered.

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The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, along with Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the Norton Thoracic Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Arizona, have received a $3.5 million federal grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the cause of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) the nation’s most common and severe form of fibrotic lung disease.

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Seemingly harmless fluid-filled spaces around the cerebral small vessels, commonly seen on brain MRIs in older adults, are now thought to be associated with more compromised cognitive skills, according to a Vanderbilt University Medical Centerstudy published in Neurology.

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With the aid of $2.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Vanderbilt researchers are on a quest to develop early biomarkers of treatment outcomes for patients with temporal lobe epilepsy based on their individual brain networks.

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Researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and colleagues have identified a gene that increases the risk for a severe and potentially life-threatening reaction to the commonly prescribed antibiotic vancomycin. Routine testing for this gene could improve patient safety and reduce unnecessary avoidance of other antibiotics, they reported in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

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The science of sleep, and how to get people to do it better, is getting attention from policymakers to researchers who are trying to understand how sleep impacts performance and health.

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Frogs don’t like living near noisy highways any better than people do, but research from Vanderbilt suggests that frogs, like hardened city-dwellers, can learn to adapt to the constant din of rumbling trucks, rolling tires and honking horns. And, just like those urbanites who can’t get a good night’s sleep without the sporadic sounds of sirens, some frogs have grown accustomed to the rattle and hum of the highway.

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Thousands of Americans die each year during a dangerous two-minute procedure to insert a breathing tube. Now a Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) study in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is showing that using bag-mask ventilation, squeezing air from a bag into the mouth for 60 seconds to help patients’ breathing, improves outcomes and could potentially save lives.

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IBM Watson Health today announced plans to make a 10-year, $50 million investment in joint research collaborations with Brigham and Women’s Hospital – the teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School – and Vanderbilt University Medical Center to advance the science of artificial intelligence (AI) and its application to major public health issues.

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Using sophisticated gene sequencing and computing techniques, researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center have achieved a first-of-its-kind glimpse into how the body’s immune system gears up to fight off infection.

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Kidney transplant recipients are now benefiting from donor organs that do not match their blood type but are compatible and just as safe, according to a Vanderbilt University Medical Center study in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

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Babies born after being exposed to opioids before birth are more likely to be delivered in regions of the U.S. with high rates of long-term unemployment and lower levels of mental health services, according to a study from researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the RAND Corporation.

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Vanderbilt vaccine researchers are enrolling adult volunteers in a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored Phase II clinical trial that will study a next generation pertussis vaccine that may protect people from whooping cough.