About the Authors

Lufei Hu

Contributed equally to this work with: Lufei Hu, Yinhong Chen, Xiaoyan Zhou

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Resources, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Department of Cardiometabolic Diseases, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Yinhong Chen

Contributed equally to this work with: Lufei Hu, Yinhong Chen, Xiaoyan Zhou

Roles Conceptualization, Resources, Validation, Writing – original draft

Affiliation Department of Cardiometabolic Diseases, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Xiaoyan Zhou

Contributed equally to this work with: Lufei Hu, Yinhong Chen, Xiaoyan Zhou

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Resources, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Quantitative Biosciences, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Maarten Hoek

Roles Conceptualization, Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Department of Cardiometabolic Diseases, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America, Biology Department, Maze Therapeutics, San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Jason Cox

Roles Project administration, Resources, Writing – review & editing

Affiliations Chemistry, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America, Discovery Chemistry, Kinnate Biopharma, San Diego, CA, United States of America

Ken Lin

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Resources

Affiliations Pharmacokinetics, Pharmacodynamics & Drug Metabolism, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America, Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics, BridgeBio, Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Yang Liu

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology, Resources, Software

Affiliation Department of Cardiometabolic Diseases, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Wendy Blumenschein

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology

Affiliation Department of Molecular Discovery Profiling and Expression, Merck & Co. Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Jeff Grein

Roles Formal analysis, Methodology

Affiliation Department of Molecular Discovery Profiling and Expression, Merck & Co. Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Gayathri Swaminath

Roles Conceptualization, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

gswaminath@gmail.com

Affiliation Department of Cardiometabolic Diseases, Merck & Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have read the journal’s policy and have the following competing interests: all authors were paid employees of Merck & Co., Inc. at the time of the study. There are no patents, products in development or marketed products associated with this research to declare. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.