What are we up to?

The Claussnitzer lab is part of a series of national and international V2F consortia and alliances including the UM1 NEWS team, the Accelerated Medicine Partnership Common Metabolic Disease (AMP CMD), the International Common Disease Alliance (ICDA), the Atlas of Variant Effects (AVE), and the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanism of Disease.

Current Projects

  1. Single locus V2F studies in cardiometabolic cell types: The Claussnitzer lab uses a combination of computational and experimental strategies to dissect a series of genetic risk loci associated with cardiometabolic disease by tracing the variant effect from V-RE-G-M/F providing actionable targets and mechanisms of action.

  2. CellGenBank: The Claussnitzer team is actively collaborating with Dr. Cornelia Griggs at the MGH Weight Center to establish a population-scale cellular biobank of adipose-derived mesenchymal stem cells (AMSCs) derived from subcutaneous and visceral adipose tissues from thousands of individuals (CellGenBank). These AMSCs are used for in vitro natural genetic variation screen (GWAS-in-a-dish) studies and high-throughput CRISPR perturbation screens combined with high-dimensional phenotypic profiling read-outs to systematically map the phenotypic impact of metabolic genetic risk variants on cellular phenotypes across cell state transitions.

  3. PRS2F: The Claussnitzer lab links aggregated genome-wide polygenic risk scores for cardiometabolic traits and diseases to their context-dependent molecular and cellular effects using a series of high-dimensional read-outs.

  4. Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Genomic Mechanisms of Disease (NNFC) at the Broad Institute: The Claussnitzer lab is a major contributor to the NNF Center at the Broad Institute. The NNFC is a bridgehead center and joint initiative by the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark and the Broad Institute to pioneer technologies, tools, and methods to enable biomedical researchers worldwide to systematically turn genetic insights in common diseases into biological mechanisms—a key step towards developing new generations of medicines.

  5. Pioneering scalable V2F paradigms for cardiometabolic disease