10 Years Anniversary - time to remember

 

Today, ten years ago, our most often cited (1710 times) paper "Genomewide association analysis of coronary artery disease" was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

Together with the papers from R. McPherson and A. Helgadottir, as well as the famous WTCCC paper - all published in Summer 2007 - this was the starting shot for a decade of fascinating science to understand, or to be more precise, to partly understand the genetics of coronary artery disease and myocardial infarction (for those who are interested in more details please see recent reviews by Visscher et al. (2017) and Khera & Kathiresan (2017)). There is still a lot to learn. 

A great primer about GWAS and its way to precision medicine can be found here.

And a nice animation showing the accumulation of GWAS hits across the genome from 2005-2017 can be found below. 
The Images are courtesy of the NHGRI-EBI GWAS Catalog.

But it was not only the beginning of excellent science and important findings, it was also the start of very close collaborations and friendships. 
For us, at the ICG, all started with the EU funded project "Cardiogenics". 

With some of the partners from "Cardiogenics" we are still in very close exchange of project ideas and data sets. 

The CARDIoGRAM and CARDIoGRAMplusC4D consortia are, at least in parts, originating from "Cardiogenics". As a group we increased the numbers of CAD risk loci by almost 30 this year. Besides identifying novel risk loci we have contributed to the biology of some of these loci and are still working to better understand the underlying mechanisms. 

To celebrate this important decade of genomics research we are organizing a symposium at our University on January 12th, 2018. 

Agenda and details about venue, accrediation, and accomodation, as well as online registration (free) can be found on our symposium website at www.symposium10yearsGWAS.org.

Hope to see you in Lübeck next year!

JE