Dr Carolyn Lam:                Welcome to Circulation on the Run. Your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the Journal and its editors. I'm Doctor Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. This week's journal features an international external validation study of the 2014 ESE Guidelines on Sudden Cardiac Death Prevention in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. A very exciting discussion coming right up after these summaries.                                                 The first original paper this week suggests that proteomics, a tool of precision medicine may prove useful in improving the safety and efficiency of drug development. First author, Doctor Williams, Corresponding Author, Doctor Ganz, from the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital retrospectively applied large scale proteomics to blood samples from Illuminate, the trial of Torcetrapib, a cholesterol estrotransfer protein inhibitor, which raised HDL and lowered LDL cholesterol. Recall that this trial was terminated due to increases in cardiovascular events and mortality.                                                 In the current study, the authors found that plasma concentrations of 200 proteins changed significantly with Torcetrapib. Their pathway analysis revealed unexpected and widespread changes in immune and inflammatory functions, as well as changes in aldosterone function and glycemic control. A previously validated nine protein risk score was similar in the two treatment arms at baseline, but higher in participants with subsequent events. At three months, the absolute nine protein derived risk increased in the Torcetrapib plus Atorvastatin arm compared to the Atorvastatin only arm. Thus, this protein-based risk score predicted harm from Torcetrapib within just three months. A protein-based risk assessment embedded within a large proteomic survey may prove to be useful in the evaluation of therapies to prevent harm to patients. This is discussed in an accompanying editorial entitled "Harnessing the Power of Proteomics to Assess Drug Safety and Guide Clinical Trials" by Doctor Maggie Lam and Ying Ge.                                                 The next study suggests that personalized monitoring of heart transplant outcomes may be achieved by profiling the genetic and phenotypic markers of the CD16-dependent natural killer cell activation pathway. First and corresponding author Dr. Paul from Vascular Research center in Marseilles in France and his colleagues collected blood samples from 103 patients undergoing routine coronary angiography for cardiac allograph vasculopathy diagnosis, a median of five years since their heart transplantation. They used a non-invasive natural killer cellular-humoral activation test to evaluate the association between genetic and phenotypic markers of the CD16 dependent natural killer cell activation pathway. They showed that the Fc-gamma receptor IIIAVV polymorphic variant, which encodes the highly responsive CD16-Fc receptor, was an independent baseline predictor of cardiac allograph vasculopathy, and may be useful for stratifying patients at higher risk of rejection. The implications of these findings also include the fact that individualized natural killer cell targeted therapies may limit vascular damage in responsive patients.                                                 The next study suggests that estimation of polygenic atrial fibrillation risk is feasible, and together with clinical risk factor burden, can explain lifetime risk of atrial fibrillation. Co-first authors Dr. Weng and Preis, corresponding author Dr. Lubitz from Massachusetts General Hospital, and colleagues estimated the lifetime risk of atrial fibrillation in individuals from the community-based Framingham Heart Study. Polygenic risk for atrial fibrillation was derived using a score of approximately 1000 atrial fibrillation-associated SNPs. Clinical risk factor burden was