Jenny Mjösberg awarded the 2023 Göran Gustafsson Prize in medicine
Jenny Mjösberg, Professor of Tissue Immunology at Karolinska Institutet, is one of five researchers to be awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize this year. The prize is intended for young researchers in medicine, molecular biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics and is awarded by the Göran Gustafsson Foundations in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
The prize sum is SEK 6 million, of which SEK 300,000 is a personal prize and the remaining amount is awarded as a research grant over three years. Jenny Mjösberg, who is a researcher at the Center for Infectious Medicine, at the Department of Medicine Huddinge, receives the Göran Gustafsson Prize in medicine for her research about the body's innate immune system, which can lead to better therapies for intestinal diseases.
Her research group works, among other things, to analyse intestinal samples from patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cancer of the intestine. The aim is both to learn more about the intestinal immune system and about which patients respond to treatment and why.
Find new targets for therapies
“What we want to achieve with our research is first and foremost to create a greater understanding of the immune system in the human gut, which we still don’t know enough about”, says Jenny Mjösberg in a press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (in translation from Swedish). “This will make it possible to find new targets for therapies in the future. We also try to find out which patients will respond well to the treatments that is available today, and this part of our research may be of benefit to patients in the nearby future.”
The Göran Gustafsson Prize has existed since 1991. The foundation awarding the prize was created after a donation by the entrepreneur and businessman Göran Gustafsson (1919–2003). The prize awardees must be no more than 45 years old and intend to carry out most of their research in Sweden. The other three recipients of this year's Göran Gustafsson Prize are researchers at Stockholm University (physics), KTH (mathematics), and Lund University (chemistry).