KI researcher Carl Sellgren Majkowitz receives major grant for schizophrenia research
Together with two other researchers, from the University of Copenhagen (Konstantin Khodosevich and Alicia Lundby) and the University of Zürich in Switzerland (Urs Meyer), Carl Sellgren Majkowitz from the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology will receive DKK 30 million from the Lundbeck Foundation.
“The most important thing with this grant is that we will strengthen the collaboration between groups that have the same type of research questions but study them in complementary models. We now also have the opportunity to harmonize our models which will facilitate interpretation of our findings, says Carl Sellgren Majkowitz, researcher at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, KI.
Genetic risk factors and the development of schizophrenia
Despite the fact that a large number of genetic risk variants have been linked to schizophrenia, little is known about the mechanisms underlying schizophrenia. Now, researchers from Karolinska Institutet, the University of Copenhagen and the University of Zürich have joined forces to close this knowledge gap.
The main task for Carl Sellgren and his collaborators is to investigate the mechanisms that cause people to develop schizophrenia. The main approach will be to perform large-scale genetic engineering in so-called human brain organoids, an in vitro model of the developing brain, as well as in mice, and study the effect of many genetic risk variants in the same model.
This will give the researchers a fairer picture of the genetic burden that patients are exposed to, given that most cases of schizophrenia are due to exposure to many different genetic risk variants.
“Now we can work even more closely than before and more efficiently by utilising the expertise of each lab. The grant will also be an incentive for us to facilitate the exchange of students between the labs, concludes Carl Sellgren Majkowitz.
The project will run for five years starting in March 2025.