Mitja Mitrovic

TL;DR: A meta-analysis of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis genome-wide association scans is undertaken, followed by extensive validation of significant findings, with a combined total of more than 75,000 cases and controls.

TL;DR: The complex genetic architecture of the risk regions of and refine the risk signals for celiac disease are defined, providing the next step toward uncovering the causal mechanisms of the disease.

TL;DR: This analysis compared 3,789 PSC cases of European ancestry to 25,079 population controls across 130,422 SNPs genotyped using the Immunochip to identify 12 genome-wide significant associations outside the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex, 9 of which were new, increasing the number of known PSC risk loci to 16.

Abstract: Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a severe liver disease of unknown etiology leading to fibrotic destruction of the bile ducts and ultimately to the need for liver transplantation. We compared 3,789 PSC cases of European ancestry to 25,079 population controls across 130,422 SNPs genotyped using the Immunochip. We identified 12 genome-wide significant associations outside the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex, 9 of which were new, increasing the number of known PSC risk loci to 16. Despite comorbidity with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in 72% of the cases, 6 of the 12 loci showed significantly stronger association with PSC than with IBD, suggesting overlapping yet distinct genetic architectures for these two diseases. We incorporated association statistics from 7 diseases clinically occurring with PSC in the analysis and found suggestive evidence for 33 additional pleiotropic PSC risk loci. Together with network analyses, these findings add to the genetic risk map of PSC and expand on the relationship between PSC and other immune-mediated diseases.

TL;DR: Targeted sequencing of sixteen SLE risk loci among 1349 Caucasian cases and controls produced a comprehensive dataset of the variations causing susceptibility to systemic lupus erythematosus, demonstrating that common disease alleles contain multiple causal variants modulating multiple immune system genes.