Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation awards grants totalling 125 million SEK
[NEWS 2011-10-12]Three research projects at Karolinska Institutet are each to receive a five-year funding package through a project grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.
Tomas Olsson and colleagues have been granted 57,232,000 SEK for their project entitled "Autoimmune diseases; new approaches for understanding pathogenesis and to develop prevention and therapy using Swedish registers, biobanks and animal platforms."
The project is a study of autoimmune disease that affect different organs, including the central nervous system (MS) and joints (rheumatoid arthritis) as well as a detailed examination of the significance and fine specificity of adaptive immunity, which can provide source data for immunospecific therapy.
Karl Ekwall and colleagues are to receive 41,860,000 SEK for their project entitled "Clinical epigenetics of acute myeloid leukaemia - a combined epigenomics approach".
Epigenetics is the study of how inherited information in cells and in individuals can be altered without affecting the DNA sequence. It has been shown that epigenetic conditions are altered in cancer cells, and this project will examine this phenomenon in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), a very serious form of cancer that currently has a survival rate of only 15 per cent. The goal is to develop better diagnostic methods for AML.
Birgitta Henriques Normark and colleagues have been granted 25,835,000 SEK for their project entitled "Bacterial modulation of early clearing responses and its effect on infectious disease outcome - BERIDO". This is a multidisciplinary project that aims to understand how bacteria affect the innate immune system and how the innate immune system is designed to fight infectious diseases. The project will focus especially on respiratory tract infections and early events that might determine whether the infection will be cleared or will develop.
The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation is one of Swedens largest research financiers.