James West, Ph.D.

Dr. West is an associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, and Critical Care Medicine. Dr. West is an NIH-funded basic and translational investigator interested in both basic mechanism and development of therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Dr. West's efforts have focused on creating molecularly accurate mouse models of disease, to gain a better understanding of the molecular etiology of pulmonary hypertension, and to improve the translational success of therapies moving from bench to bedside. By continuous comparison between models and patients, models are refined to better match the patients, and new fundamental properties of disease in patients are discovered.

Dr. West also focuses on informatics approaches, targeted both at a better understanding of disease etiology, and at personalized medicine. Patient response to therapy is extremely variable, and determining a priori the factors that predict response to specific drugs hold the promise of dramatically improving drug targeting and thus outcomes.

Dr. West is an associated editor for Pulmonary Circulation and PLoS One, and has served on numerous grant review boards both nationally and internationally.