About VCOTT

Scope

VCOTT brings together clinical and translational research involving patients with obesity at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Its scope covers interventional and observational trials, mechanistic studies, and preclinical experiments in which obesity is the condition under study or the principal inclusion criterion. That includes industry-sponsored pharmacotherapy trials, investigator-initiated trials, pragmatic studies embedded in routine care, comparative effectiveness analyses using registry or claims data, and mechanistic studies using specimens from these patients.

Why one group

• For sponsors, a single group with one point of contact can be evaluated as a site, with its own track record, rather than as a set of individual investigators.
• For recruitment, identification and screening built into the medical record can serve many studies once it exists.
• For mechanistic science, specimen collection has to be part of a protocol from the start; placing trial design and laboratory capability in one group allows it to be planned that way.

People

The co-directors and collaborators are introduced on the People page.

Member investigators

Member investigators currently come from surgery, endocrinology, infectious diseases, epidemiology, biostatistics, and biomedical informatics.

Describing VCOTT

For colleagues, journals, and meeting organizers who need a short description:

VCOTT, the Vanderbilt Collaborative for Obesity Trials and Translational science, is a clinical and translational research group at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Led by co-directors Jason M. Samuels, MD, FACS, and Charles Robert Flynn, PhD, it conducts interventional, observational, and mechanistic studies in obesity, and identifies candidates for its investigator-initiated trials through automated screening in the electronic health record.