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Triglycerides and coronary artery disease risk

A team led by ӳý researchers has found that triglycerides - the fats that our bodies burn for fuel - play a causal role in coronary artery disease (CAD), the most common form of heart disease and the leading cause of death in the United States. , which leverages new genetic data from a , suggests that lowering triglyceride levels through treatment may help reduce the risk of CAD. The findings appear this week in Nature Genetics.

In his September 13, TEDxCambridge lecture, ‘Decoding a Genomic Revolution,’ ӳý associate member and MIT associate professor Manolis Kellis used details from his own genome to demonstrate how science can bridge the gap between genetic variants and disease.

Check out the video below and accompany Kellis on a journey into his personal genome to find out how recent discoveries could change the future of medical care.

There is no final chapter in the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia. Like many resources and tools in biomedicine, researchers are rewriting and expanding this metaphorical book. The encyclopedia has grown well beyond genomes and now contains many different pieces of information on 1,000 cell lines representing more than 20 different kinds of cancer.

TCGA graphic

Cancer has come to be known as a “disease of the genome.” Any number of alterations to an individual’s genetic code – the sequence of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts that serve as our biological blueprint – has the potential to make a cell malfunction and proliferate into cancer tumors. Identifying the genetic changes that lead to cancer – and the rules that govern those changes – has been a key goal in the field of cancer genomics. It is a task made more challenging by the diversity of cancer types and the seemingly distinct biology of different types of cancers.