News archive

Global figures betray a worrying situation. At the same time, it appears the world has woken up. Our PopSci magazine, Medicinsk Vetenskap, has taken the temperature of the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Last Thursday (27 October), the Swedish Research Council announced the grants it will be awarding in the category of medicine and health. The total sum is almost SEK 980 million, of which KI researchers will receive SEK 524,325,017.

Professor Carol Tishelman has just received the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the European Oncology Nursing Society (EONS) for a lifetime commitment to cancer prevention.

The research group SOLIID at the Medical Management Centre (MMC) at the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics has been awarded a research grant from Vinnova for a project presenting new approaches to support innovative development in large healthcare organizations.

Jan Albert is featured on Sveriges Radio in a program about the spread of HIV in the 1970s.

Professor Per-Olof Berggren has been appointed Distinguished Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy.

Professor Hans Hertz at KTH (as main applicant) and Professor Marie Arsenian Henriksson at MTC and Professor Muhammet Toprak at KTH (as co-applicants) have received a grant for 33 090 000 SEK from The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. The grant is for their project entitled ”Molecular X-Ray Micro Imaging” and will cover a five year period.

Per-Olof Berggren, Professor of Experimental Endocrinology at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, has been elected as member of the National Academy of Medicine, NAM.

Maria Albin researches how the environments in which we work and live affect our health. She is particularly interested in issues relating to sustainability – what work content and employment conditions are needed for people to continue enjoying what they do.

To understand the interaction between virulent organisms and the immune system, we need to know what the proteins involved actually look like – that is, what three-dimensional structures they have. This is the objective of Adnane Achour’s research, his main objects of interest being the immune system’s T cells and the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae.

Mikael Karlsson, Professor of Immunology at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, researches the regulation of the immune system and why it sometimes becomes disrupted, leading to disease. He is particularly interested in B cells and macrophages. His research adds to knowledge of autoimmune diseases and is also related to cancer.

Tomas Jernberg researches differences between groups of heart attack patients and is particularly interested in those with reduced kidney function – a group that has a worse prognosis and that has been particularly neglected by science.

Anna Färnert is Professor of Infectious Medicine, especially Tropical Medicine at the Department of Medicine, Solna. Her research is about malaria, above all how the immune system’s response to the disease is affected by different factors. She has shown, for example, that immunity disappears much more quickly than previously thought and that repeated infections by different strains are important for the immune system to protect against the disease.

The idea that type 1 diabetes is caused by a virus is an old hypothesis that has recently been revived. Malin Flodström Tullberg is Professor of Type 1 Diabetes at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge and her research is about the link between enteroviruses and type 1 diabetes. She also hopes to be able to contribute to a new enterovirus vaccine.

Sophie Erhardt researches biological mechanisms behind mental illness. With her discovery that patients with schizophrenia have elevated levels of kynurenic acid in the brain, she has laid the foundations of a scientific field that has attracted a great many research groups around the world.

Annika Östman Wernerson researches molecular mechanisms causing different kidney diseases in the hope that the knowledge generated will lead to more effective diagnosis, care and treatment. She also researches the field of pedagogics, studying how students cope with and are affected by unpleasant experiences during their education.

Knut Lönnroth’s main line of research is the socioeconomic risk factors for tuberculosis and how the health services, especially in low and middle-income countries, can be designed to combat the disease more effectively. At KI, migration and health will also be an important theme of his research.