Patient welfare is a top priority for Nashville Biosciences and as such, we are committed to transparency in our practices and ensuring the protection of patient data.

Prior to any blood test, patients are provided with information about BioVU®, its research and goals. After learning about the program, patients are presented with a consent form in which they can either choose to donate their leftover blood sample or decline to participate. If a patient does not want to donate any leftover samples to BioVU®, they simply do not sign the form. If a patient consents to share his or her leftover samples with BioVU® and is a match for current research programs, BioVU® removes all personally identifiable information from the sample and medical record, then stores it in a safe and secure location. Additionally, if a patient changes their mind after signing the BioVU® consent form, they can call a BioVU® helpline to withdraw their participation from any future research.

Nashville Biosciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and BioVU® regularly engage experts in ethics, science and research, operations, data security, and patient advocacy, among others, to ensure the accessibility and transparency of our information and to inform engagement with all stakeholders, including patients.

An Unparalleled Resource for Improving Human Health

BioVU® is a bio-bank of de-identified longitudinal medical records and DNA extracted from discarded blood samples collected during routine clinical care designed to enable exploration of the relationships among genetic variation, disease susceptibility and variable drug responses.

Creating News Means of Diagnosing, Treating and Preventing Disease

Drug discovery traditionally has been approached by attempting to identify the genes or targets underlying the disease of interest and then identifying a molecule that interacts with that target. With this approach, we don’t always understand the disease process or how the drug target is implicated in the disease. The pursuit of new targets is also difficult.

The pheWAS™ approach increases the probability of R&D success by leveraging natural genetic ‘experiments’ within human DNA. We use small mutations naturally present in each and every human genome, and correlate those mutations to the full disease landscape. This ‘target-first’ approach allows us to map out diseases that may be treated by a new drug or potential sides effects that may occur.