Sander W. van der Laan

This study identifies desert hedgehog (DHH) as a resilience factor that prevents atherosclerosis by inhibiting PAI-1 signaling and endothelial mesenchymal transition.

This study identifies autoimmune-like CD8⁺ T cell responses as drivers of atherosclerotic plaque instability and predictors of cardiovascular events in humans and mice.

This study identifies shared genetic risk between major depression and atherosclerotic diseases and links causal gene expression changes in blood, brain, and heart tissues to depression etiology.

The paper links ADAR1-mediated RNA editing in smooth muscle cells to regulation of MDA5 activation, showing its role in atherosclerosis progression and vascular calcification.

This study validates the two-hit hypothesis showing disturbed flow and hypercholesterolemia together reprogram endothelial cells to immune-like and foam cells during atherogenesis.

The paper performs a GWAS in a case-only design to identify genetic loci influencing age at onset of ischemic stroke and finds a robust association with the APOE locus, suggesting potential survival bias rather than direct causation.

This study performs a meta-analysis of scRNA-seq datasets to map human atherosclerosis cell diversity and identifies disease-relevant vascular cell states and markers.

This study uses GWAS and Mendelian randomization to show that lower sclerostin levels increase risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, myocardial infarction, and atherogenic lipid profiles.

The paper uses proteogenomic integration to identify CXCL10 as a mediator of IL-6 signaling effects on atherosclerosis, showing its association with cardiovascular disease risk and lesion characteristics.

LoFTK automatically predicts LoF variants and identifies genes affected by compound heterozygous LoF variants in genomes.

This study identifies 144 genetic loci associated with abdominal aortic aneurysm and highlights PCSK9 as a therapeutic target through Mendelian Randomization and pre-clinical validation.

PolarMorphism identifies pleiotropic SNPs from GWAS summary statistics by converting SNP effect sizes to polar coordinates, revealing shared genetic variants across multiple traits.

This study investigates the causal relationship between DNA methylation of shear stress-associated genes in carotid plaques and cardiovascular disease risk using Mendelian randomisation, finding no significant association.

The paper identifies a genetic variant associated with increased carotid plaque vulnerability but not with cardiovascular disease risk in humans.

This study examines the association between family history and polygenic risk scores with secondary cardiovascular events in patients undergoing carotid endarterectomy, finding both factors independently increase risk.

The paper compares two phenotyping approaches for ischemic stroke subtypes and identifies a genetic risk locus for small vessel stroke using the intersect phenotype.

The paper investigates the association between genetic risk variants and clinical features of abdominal aortic aneurysms using a biobank cohort, finding a weak polygenic correlation with aneurysm diameter but no clear individual variant associations.

The paper identifies genetic variants and transcripts associated with glycemic traits by analyzing exome-array data from 144,600 individuals, highlighting tissue-specific roles in glucose regulation.