News archive

Readership of news articles written by KI researchers for The Conversation jumped 62 percent on the year in 2022. Since KI became a member two years ago, 43 researchers have penned over 42 articles, reaching around 3.8 million readers worldwide. “I have never experienced such a response to my research before,” says postdoc Filip Gedin.

A clinical study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital shows that the hunger hormone ghrelin can increase the heart’s pump capacity in patients with heart failure. The results have been published in the European Heart Journal.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet suggests that electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), lithium, and clozapine may reduce suicide rates in adolescent men with severe mental illness, consistent with previous findings in adults. The study, published in Nature Communications, compared treatment and suicide rates across different regions in Sweden.

Eighteen kidney researchers at Karolinska Institutet have been allocated grants totaling 3.2 million Swedish kronor from the Swedish Kidney Foundation, an announcement made in connection with World Kidney Day on March 9.

Katie Healy at the Department of Dental Medicine and Sebastian Ols at the Department of Medicine in Solna, receive the Sven Gard's scholarship 2023. Sven Gard's scholarship is awarded annually for the best dissertation in virology. The scholarship takes place as a result of nomination.

KI Professor Maria Bradley is awarded the Medicine Doctor Axel Hirsch prize 2023 for her breadth of research and for her remarkable efforts in the field of atopic eczema.

On 1 April, a coordinated exam service will be introduced at KI, which means changed routines for how you as a student register for written examinations on-site. It applies to all examinations given from 1 April onwards. This means that the new routines come into effect from mid-March.

A new routine is also introduced on how you get your placement in the examination room.

Karolinska Institutet has been awarded a new EU prize for its long-term commitment to gender equality in higher education. The prize of 100,000 euro is the result of nearly 40 years of sustained activity to advance equal opportunities. The efforts have paid off and now KI is recognized as a role model for equality, a “Gender Equality Champion.”

Competing risks and multi-state models allow us to study complex disease settings and answer composite research questions and should be used more widely in epidemiology.

Immunotherapy has been shown to greatly improve survival rates for certain types of cancer. However, in some cases, it can lead to an over-activation of the immune system, which can be dangerous. In a recent review by researchers at Karolinska Institutet, potential therapies have been identified, which might make it possible to continue with immunotherapy even when facing severe side effects.

In a study entitled "Bacterial Meningitis in Africa", recently published in Frontiers in Neurology as part of the Research Topic "Neuroimmunology in Africa", researchers raise awareness of strides and recommendations in the diagnosis, management and prevention of bacterial meningitis.

Several KI researchers are part of an international project that has been awarded nearly $15 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with $1 million co-funding from the Swedish government. The project involves a multi-country study to better understand the burden of Human papillomavirus (HPV) among girls and women in low and lower middle-income countries.

Modern research often uses high-tech methods and tools that require particular expertise. Despite this, there has been no career paths in Sweden for individuals interested in the technical and methodological development needed to operate and develop the research infrastructures of the future. Starting April 1, 2023, such a career path will be available at KI, possibly the first of its kind in the country.

At the beginning of 2023 we, the Department of Medicine Solna (MedS), asked the library to generate bibliometric data, as one approach to gauge our scientific activity and contribution to knowledge production.

Mats Hallgren receives a grant of 3 930 000 SEK for the project “Post covid-19 as a threat to healthy ageing: a randomized controlled trial of yoga to improve quality of life”.

Being on parental leave is protective against poorer mental health particularly among mothers, with evidence of this beneficial effect continuing in later life, according to a systematic review in The Lancet Public Health.

Researchers at the Thoracic Surgery research group, the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, have performed a nation-wide study of patients who underwent bioprosthetic aortic valve replacement in Sweden between 2003 and 2018. The study is published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, JACC, and shows that it is less dangerous than previously believed to receive a small bioprosthetic aortic valve in relation to the patients size.

KI Professor Rickard Sandberg has been awarded the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship in Medicine by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a donation of 10 million Swedish kronor for a five-year period. Rickard Sandberg has developed methods that make it possible to deeply penetrate the human genome by studying genes in individual cells.

Maja Fjaestad is the latest in a line of expert coordinators that have been recruited to the Centre for Health Crises at KI. The LIME-researcher and former under-secretary of state will work in the expert field of policy and preparedness. She looks forward to contributing with a holistic outlook when it comes to health threats.

Zarina Kabir, docent at the Division of Nursing, has been awarded 4 250 000 SEK from Forte for the project "m-Health based intervention by community workers to support family caregivers to persons with dementia living at home".

Rumours spread faster than ever nowadays thanks to social media, and it is easy to get carried away. Some people are also inherently more vulnerable to conspiracy theories. However, sceptics’ concerns should be addressed, not dismissed, say researchers who are studying people’s willingness to take different kinds of vaccines.

With the help of a multi-language smartphone app, parents in Sweden were able to give their young children better dietary habits and less screen time, a study by researchers from Karolinska Institutet published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity reports.

Karolinska Institutet has decided to make Wilhelmina Hoffman, specialist in geriatric medicine, and economist Fredrik Lundberg honorary doctors. The formal ceremony will take place in connection with the doctoral conferment ceremony at Stockholm City Hall on 12 May.

A new study published in BMC Public Health, shows that screening in schools can improve psychotic symptoms in adolescents. The study is partly produced by researcher at the National centre for suicide research and prevention at Karolinska Institutet.

Next-generation sequencing studies have in recent years revealed numerous recurrently mutated genes in chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). These mutations are usually found in a relatively small percentage of cases and associated with poor clinical outcome.

Our newest team member Irene Wanyana joins the Department of Global Public to pursue her PhD. In her research project titled Multisectoral Approaches to Sustainable Health in Uganda, A focus on the role of climatic variabilities on maternal and child health, Irene aims to explore the linkages that exist between health and other Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in Uganda.

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.

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.

Three questions to Tessa Schillemans, Unit of Unit of Cardiovascular and Nutritional Epidemiology at the Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM)

The new president of Karolinska Institutet, Annika Östman Wernerson, is professor of renal and transplantation science and has a passion for pedagogical research. Internal culture and building ‘one KI’ by strengthening the dialogue and communication between management, departments, staff and students is one of her biggest driving forces.

Martin Bergö does not want to make drastic changes. As KI’s new vice-president, he plans to first tidy his desk, then team up with the new president, Annika Östman Wernerson, and listen to what the organisation has to say. “We’ll be tackling the most important issues together, such as establishing a good internal dialogue.”

Inflammatory diseases have complex disease mechanisms that can differ from patient to patient with the same diagnosis. This means that currently available drugs have little effect on many patients. Using so-called digital twins, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now obtained a deeper understanding of the “off and on” proteins that control these diseases. The study, which is published in Cell Reports Medicine, can lead to more personalised drug therapies.

Child obesity is linked to increased risk of developing diabetes in adulthood, both autoimmune forms of diabetes and different forms of type 2 diabetes, a new study published in Diabetologia reports. The risk of developing the most insulin-resistant form of diabetes is, for example, three times as high in children with obesity.

An online anonymous cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) treatment program for individuals with a sexual interest in children showed good results in an English language pilot study. Now the CBT program for crime prevention also opens in Swedish, German, and Portuguese. The treatment program, which has been developed by researchers and psychologists at Karolinska Institutet, will be evaluated within the framework of an international research collaboration funded by the EU.

StratNeuro announces grants for Collaborative Neuroscience Research Projects.

The StratNeuro Visiting Scholars funding aims to attract outstanding scholars from non-Swedish universities for short-term visits (1-6 months long). This call aims to support new international collaborations and scientific exchange within the Karolinska Institutet Neuroscience community. We encourage applications for Visiting Scholars from our NeurotechEU partner universities. For the Visiting Scholar this is an opportunity to engage with neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet.

KI is launching a new podcast: The PAPERs podcast. Every week you will drop into the conversation between four hosts who discuss articles addressing health professions education. While the content is rigorous, the hosts offer accessible insights with lighthearted style, making this podcast regular listening for many scholars’.

A Swedish study which followed more than 450,000 individuals after lower or upper gastrointestinal biopsy, suggests that symptoms of IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) may start significantly before disease shows up on biopsy. The results were published in the open access journal PLOS Medicine on Feb 23.

Ole Petter Ottersen has been president of Karolinska Institutet for five and a half years. At the end of this month, February 2023, he will be leaving his office for the last time. Of all he has seen and done during this time, one day is particularly memorable.

As air pollution in Stockholm has decreased, so has the lung capacity of children and adolescents has improved, a new study published in the European Respiratory Journal reports. The researchers from Karolinska Institutet consider the results important, since the lung health of the young greatly affects the risk of their developing chronic lung diseases later in life.

Women with rheumatic diseases are at greater risk of complications during pregnancy and childbirth, but for women with axial spondyloarthritis the risks have decreased over the last ten years, according to a register study from Karolinska Institutet. This decrease coincided with an increased use of biologic drugs during the same period. The study was published in The Lancet Rheumatology.

The first detailed description of the microbiota and immune cells among asymptomatic Helicobacter pylori-infected individuals has been published by researchers at Karolinska Institutet. The results of the study will be instrumental to understand the complex microbiome and immunity network and provide new insights for asymptomatic Helicobacter pylori infection.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have been looking at how movement shapes our senses and how sensory and motor processes are both affected in Parkinson’s disease. In a study published in Nature Communications, de la Torre-Martinez et al, show that movement reduces the responses to sensory input and that both sensory and motor processes are altered in an animal model of Parkinson’s disease.

The regulations for which categories of international students and researchers can be offered accommodation from Swedish universities have recently changed. A new ordinance gives all universities the opportunity to offer housing to selected groups of students and researchers. However, this means that KI does not have the opportunity to offer housing to the same extent as before.

Marie Arsenian Henriksson has been named the new academic vice president for research and chair of the Committee for Research at Karolinska Institutet as of March 1, following a decision by KI's president on February 21.

Professor Molly Stevens at Karolinska Institutet and Imperial College London has been awarded the 2023 Novo Nordisk Prize for her pioneering work in innovative bioengineering approaches. One of her goals is to democratise access to healthcare using nanotechnologies.

Three questions to Karin Grahn, Unit of Occupational Medicine at the Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM)

On the international news site The Conversation you can read an article by Logan Pendergrast and Juleen Zierath, of the Integrative Physiology research group, where they explain their latest findings on “Morning exercise burns more body fat, mouse study shows".

Application is now open for a new global leadership programme; Leadership for Transformative Change. The programme targets leaders from all over the world who are working to contribute to transformative social development in their countries. It is offered by Uppsala University in collaboration with Karolinska Institutet, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Business Sweden, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and SALAR International.

The Centre for Health Crises at KI is expanding its group of expert coordinators. This time it is the area of expertise is health systems resilience, and it comes in the form of Helena Nordenstedt, associate professor and medical doctor, with an extensive experience. Her research interests span the area of global health and resilience to crises on a systems level.