Ethics approval and consent to participate
All procedures were approved by the local Animal Use and Care Committee and the local authorities of Upper Bavaria, Germany in accordance with European and German animal welfare regulations.
Consent for publication
All authors have declared their consent for this publication.
Availability of data and materials
The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Competing interests
M.H.T. is a member of the scientific advisory board of ERX Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA. He was a member of the Research Cluster Advisory Panel (ReCAP) of the Novo Nordisk Foundation between 2017 and 2019. He attended a scientific advisory board meeting of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, in 2016. He received funding for his research projects from Novo Nordisk (2016–2020) and Sanofi-Aventis (2012–2019). He was a consultant for Bionorica SE (2013–2017), Menarini Ricerche S. p.A. (2016), and Bayer Pharma AG Berlin (2016). As former Director of the Helmholtz Diabetes Center and the Institute for Diabetes and Obesity at Helmholtz Zentrum München (2011–2018), and since 2018, as CEO of Helmholtz Zentrum München, he has been responsible for collaborations with a multitude of companies and institutions worldwide. In this capacity, he discussed potential projects with and has signed/signs contracts for his institute(s) and for the staff for research funding and/or collaborations with industry and academia worldwide, including, but not limited to, pharmaceutical corporations like Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Medigene, Arbormed, BioSyngen, and others. In this role, he was/is further responsible for commercial technology transfer activities of his institute(s), including diabetes-related patent portfolios of Helmholtz Zentrum München as, e.g., WO/2016/188,932 A2 or WO/2017/194,499 A1. M.H.T. confirms that to the best of his knowledge none of the above funding sources were involved in the preparation of this paper.
S.S. is an employee of Cellarity, Inc and has stake-holder interests. The present work was carried out as an employee of the Helmholtz Zentrum Muenchen, HMGU.
R.D.D. is a co-inventor on intellectual property owned by Indiana University and licensed to Novo Nordisk. He was previously employed by Novo Nordisk.
B.F. is a current employee of Novo Nordisk.
T.D.M. received research funding from Novo Nordisk, but these funds were not related to here described work. T.D.M. further received speeking fees from Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca and Berlin ChemieAG.
S.M.H. receives research funding from the German Research Foundation (FOR 5298) that is unrelated to the here described work.
Funding
This work was supported in part by funding to M.H.T, S.M.H., T.D.M, Y.D. and C.W. through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB1123-A1&A4) and the DZD. T.D.M received funding for this work from the German Research Foundation (DFG TRR296, TRR152 and GRK 2816/1) and the European Research Council ERC-CoG Trusted no. 101044445.
Authors' contributions
S.S. and A.G. generated, analyzed and interpreted experimental data. S.S. drafted the manuscript; Y.D. and C.W. performed aortic plaque formation analysis and co-wrote the article; B.F., R.D.D., and M.H.T. advised study concept and critical revision of the article; T.D.M. oversaw the in vivo experiments, interpreted experimental data and co-wrote the article; S.M.H. headed the lipoprotein profile measurements and analysis, oversaw the in vivo experiments, interpreted experimental data and co-wrote the article. T.D.M. and S.M.H. are the guarantors of this work and, as such, had full access to all the data in the study and take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Acknowledgements
We thank Luisa Müller, Laura Sehrer, Emiljia Malogajski, Cynthia Striese, Sebastian Cucuruz, Markus Brielmeier at HMGU and Yvonne Jansen at IPEK for excellent assistance with mouse husbandry and experiments. C.W. is van der Laar-Professor of Atherosclerosis.
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