Welcome to Thea Bismo Strom's research group: Cellular Cholesterol Metabolism

Cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of morbidity and mortality world-wide, and dyslipidemia is one of the primary risk factors for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The effect of lowering levels of plasma LDL has been well documented to reduce the burden of coronary heart disease, where statins are the most widely used lipid-lowering drugs. However, there is a significant patient cohort reporting side effects from using statins in addition to failure to achieve sufficient LDL cholesterol reduction in severe hypercholesterolemic patients. Although there is a significant correlation between elevated levels of HDL cholesterol and reduced risk of cardiovascular events, trials of HDL cholesterol-raising treatments have given confounding results. To this end, there is a need to characterize the pathways and interaction partners of the human lipidome in order to identify novel targets for future lipid-altering strategies. The employees at Unit for Cardiac and Cardiovascular Genetics (medical doctors, researchers, engineers and genetic counselors) are cooperatively involved in both the diagnostic and research aspect of the unit, which enables a productive and high quality pipe-line benefitting both clinic and scientific research.