by Bill Snyder
Dan Roden, MD, Senior Vice President for Personalized Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will receive the PMWC 2023 Pioneer Award Jan. 27 during this year’s Precision Medicine World Conference.
Approximately 2,500 people from more than 30 countries are registered for the three-day meeting, to be held in Santa Clara, California.
Roden, professor of Medicine, Pharmacology and Biomedical Informatics, and holder of the Sam L. Clark, MD, PhD Chair, is being honored for his leadership role in VUMC’s biobank, BioVU, which conference officials said has enabled “deep exploration of the genetic causes of disease.”
Launched in 2007, BioVU is the world’s largest DNA biobank based at a single academic institution, with more than 300,000 biological samples.
Roden is internationally known for his studies of the mechanisms and treatment of abnormal heart rhythms and variability in drug response. One major interest has been pharmacogenomics, and especially the role genetic variations play in adverse drug reactions such as drug-induced arrhythmias.
The author of more than 700 peer-reviewed scientific papers, Roden is a leader in VUMC’s Pharmacogenomic Resource for Enhanced Decisions in Care and Treatment (PREDICT), which since 2010 has applied genomic testing to drug prescribing to avoid adverse drug reactions.
Roden is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
In 2021 he received the Oscar B. Hunter Career Award in Therapeutics, the premier award of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, in recognition of his contributions to research, patient care and teaching.
