Wei-Qi Wei, MD, PhD

Dr. Wei-Qi Wei is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Dr. Wei is a clinical informatician with a research focus on harvesting knowledge from big clinical and genetic data to enhance precision medicine, especially to improve drug safety. His current work includes deep phenotyping within big EHR data, developing resources to facilitate high-throughput phenotyping, machine learning on biomedical data, and investigating pharmacogenetic factors of common drugs. He is the creator of MEDI, a computable medication-indication resource.

 Assistant Professor 
Biomedical Informatics
wei-qi.wei@vanderbilt.edu

 Full Profile 

Featured project: Exploring Statin Pleiotropic Effects within a Very Large EHR Cohort
Statins (HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors), among the most widely prescribed agents worldwide for prevention of cardiovascular diseases, produce substantial pleiotropic effects. Pleiotropic effects are unanticipated outcomes other than those for which the drug was originally developed, either therapeutic (beneficial) or detrimental (adverse drug reactions). Statin pleiotropic effects are unanticipatedly broad, including increasing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), decreasing cancer-related mortality, and reducing dementia. Many effects are still not determined. In addition, individual responses to statins are highly variable. In this project, we investigate statin pleiotropic effects using whole de-identified electronic health records (EHRs) of >2.5 million patients at Vanderbilt, including >100,000 statin recipients. We will evaluate genetic predictors of statin pleiotropic effects as well.