Major VR grant for facilitating clinical precision medicine studies
A team of researchers at Karolinska Institutet, SciLifeLab and Karolinska University Hospital will receive a total of 14.7 million Swedish kronor from the Swedish Research Council (VR). The four-year grant is part of the council’s push to increase accessibility to research infrastructure and will involve making available new technologies for clinical studies in precision medicine.
In total, six infrastructure projects, representing five universities, are awarded just over SEK 57 million, of which the KI-led project receives the largest grant.
That project is led by Päivi Östling, researcher at the Department of Oncology-Pathology at KI and one of the scientific leads for the Precision Medicine Capabililty at SciLifeLab. Several other parties within clinical genomic and precision medicine infrastructures are also involved, including the Clinical Genomics platform at SciLifeLab, Genomic Medicine Sweden, the Centre for Clinical Cancer Studies at Karolinska University Hospital and Precision Medicine Center Karolinska (PMCK), which is a collaboration between Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital.
“We are very happy and humbled by the trust and funding for this great challenge,” says Päivi Östling. “Today's clinical trials increasingly need molecular analyses, such as genomics, to match patients to studies. SciLifeLab offers a large range of molecular profiling methods and thanks to this grant we can start to adapt additional technologies to clinical studies nationally.”
The funds are awarded as part of the Swedish Research Council's “grant for accessibility to infrastructure,” which aims to encourage researchers to participate in the construction and development of research infrastructure. The idea is that research infrastructure must be more accessible and more used by the business and public sectors.