Major investment against growing health problem

The Novo Nordisk Foundation has awarded DKK 80 million for two research programmes with focus on the relationship between metabolism and inflammation in metabolic diseases. Mikael Rydén, Unit for Endocrinology and Diabetes, is in both programmes.

Mikael Rydén is a senior physician and professor of Clinical and Experimental Fat Tissue research at the Unit of Endocrinology and Diabetes. He is one of approximately twenty appointed researchers in the collaboration between University of Copenhagen, University of Oxford, and Karolinska Institutet. The two research programmes aim to study the relationship between metabolism and inflammation in type 2 diabetes and related diseases in order to obtain a better understanding of the causal mechanisms and possibly identify novel treatment targets.

– It´s very fun that I have the opportunity to participate in both programmes! The way these programmes were set up was really different – we were ten researchers each from KI, KU and Oxford who were mixed together with the instruction to write a research application from scratch. We were divided into groups depending on what special competences we had. For some reason I ended up in two of the groups and they became the basis for the programs, says Mikael Rydén.

From the Department of Medicine, Huddinge, Myriam Aouadi is a member for one of the programmes. Programme leaders are Professor Claudia Monaco and Professor Robin Choudhury, both at the University of Oxford.