Quinn Wells, MD, PharmD, MSCI, MSc
My research program is directed toward precision medicine for cardiovascular disease, with a special interest in arrhythmic and cardiomyopathic phenotypes. The overarching goal of my lab is to understand how patient-specific features, including clinical and genetic factors, contribute to variable disease susceptibility and therapeutic response, and then translate this knowledge to patient-centered, precision care.
I conduct studies across a range of populations using a variety of techniques. A major interest is leveraging the power of the electronic health record (EHR), and in 2014 I created and was appointed director of the Vanderbilt System for EHR-based Research in Cardiovascular Health (V-SERCH). Part of the Cardiovascular Division, V-SERCH is dedicated to developing validated algorithms and tools for conducting research in the EHR environment, including advanced phenotyping methods incorporating machine learning, disease mechanism, and in vivo data. My group has led or contributed to multiple cardiovascular genomics efforts including exome sequencing based Mendelian gene discovery, characterization of phenotypic variability in cardiometabolic disease, and studies of cardiovascular and drug toxicity phenotypes that have identified potentially novel risk loci. I also co-led an institutional pilot project extending Vanderbilt’s BioVU biobank, which links DNA samples to de-identified clinical records, to include plasma samples for heart failure biomarker discovery. Our current projects will define clinical and genetic modifiers of cardiovascular disease risk, disease course, and treatment response for clinically recognized and novel, data-driven disease subtypes using EHR data.