His lab works in collaboration with groups, from both within the Broad Institute and the external research community, on projects that range in scope from metabolic phenotyping of model systems to large human cohort studies. Contributions from the platform have included the discovery of plasma metabolic signatures that indicate future risk of developing diabetes in the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort, 4-12 years before clinical diagnosis of type 2 diabetes, as well as the discovery of early indicators of pancreatic cancer in humans years before clinical diagnosis.
In the Serhan laboratory, his work focused on understanding the roles of lipid mediators in acute inflammation and its resolution. Along with Serhan, Clish discovered and characterized a new class of anti-inflammatory lipid mediators that have since been named “resolvins.”