The Accelerating Medicines Partnership® in Common Metabolic Diseases brings together researchers from multiple institutions to work towards the goal of better understanding and treatment of common metabolic diseases. Get to know the members of the consortium in our CMDKP Spotlight articles.
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Dr. Marcel den Hoed (AUTHORID:0000-0001-8081-428X), a member of the AMP® CMD Portal Team, is a Senior lecturer/assistant professor of Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Marcel's scientific background
Marcel has a PhD in Human Biology (physiological and genetic aspects of physical activity and food intake regulation). He did a post-doc in genetic epidemiology and is a group leader in translational genomics using CRISPR/Cas9 and image-based model systems in zebrafish.
Current research interests
Marcel’s current interests include efforts to improve the etiological understanding of diabetes, MASLD, and cardiovascular disease, and to discover and validate targets for prevention and treatment of common cardiometabolic diseases.
Reflections on AMP-CMD and the CMDKP
Marcel was a co-investigator in the AMP-CMD opportunity pool project OP13 from 2018-2020, and has since been a collaborator of the NEWS team. He was again awarded AMP-CMD opportunity pool funding in 2023, and in the next two years his group will work on characterizing 40 genes for their roles in common metabolic diseases, in collaboration with all AMP-CMD working groups.
What excites Marcel most about the AMP-CMD initiative is that it stimulates and facilitates collaboration between top-notch researchers with complementary skills and expertise, to enable digging deeper than each would be able to accomplish alone. This enables the scientific community to find robust and clinically relevant answers that would be unattainable individually.
Marcel is excited about the opportunity to instantaneously back-translate results obtained in model systems to humans, e.g., by identifying genes that not only show promising results in perturbation experiments in model systems, but also show evidence of rare variant associations with related traits in humans. The direction of effects for such rare variants across the spectrum of traits also provides insights as to whether that gene may encode a good target for therapeutic intervention.
Life outside the lab
In his spare time Marcel enjoys traveling, hiking, camping, climbing, endurance sports, and photography.
