Biospecimen and Clinical Data Core
The goal of the Biospecimen and Clinical Data Core (BCDC) is to leverage clinical, genetic, socioeconomic, and environmental data across participating institutions to facilitate disparities research and drive the development of new analytical methods that can better account for disease outcomes across diverse populations.
Joshua C. Denny, MD, MS
Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Medicine
Director of Center for Precision Medicine
Jacob L. McCauley, PhD
Associate Professor of Human Genetics & Pathology
Director of the Center for Genome Technology, John P. Hussman Institute for Human Genomics
Specific Aims:
- Facilitate the efficient use of existing biospecimen and clinical data repositories for health disparities research
- Support health disparities research that leverages biospecimen repositories and clinical data across multiple institutions
- Enable the linking of biological data to clinical, contextual and environmental data for health disparities research.
Research Team
Investigators
- Joshua C. Denny, MD, MS, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
- Jacob L. McCauley, PhD, University of Miami Miller School Medicine
- Siddharth Pratap, PhD, Meharry Medical College
- Nicholas Tsinoremas, PhD, University of Miami
Core Manager
- Douglas Conway, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Projects
- Collaborative-wide Data Use Agreement
- The BCDC is currently finalizing a data use agreement and data request process that will enable Collaborative researchers to generate research to cohorts across participating institutions in order to increase sample sizes and leverage characteristics unique to each institution.
- Genetic Ancestry as a Demographic
- As a supplement to the standard demographic of “race”, the BCDC is in the process of generating a genetically derived ancestry profile from subjects with available genetic data in Vanderbilt’s genetic biospecimen, BioVU.
- Geocoding
- It is becoming more and more apparent that a person’s zip code, the immediate area in which they live, is just as important as a person’s genetic code when trying to understand the etiology of disease and poor health outcomes. Unfortunately, this type of data is poorly and inconsistently documented in the health record. By leveraging available census, EPA, FDA, and other types of publicly available data regarding the environment with the core’s existing clinical data sources, we hope to enrich the data available to Collaborative members interested in disparities research.