In 2003, Dan Roden, MD, then director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, imagined a large-scale biobank integrated with electronic health records to help doctors “personalize” medical care for their patients.
That vision became BioVU, today one of the world’s largest biobanks, with around 350,000 DNA samples from a single health care system. BioVU is celebrating its 15th year and has enabled hundreds of studies and publications exploring the genetic underpinnings of a host of conditions including cancer, heart disease and diabetes.