News archive

Are you interested in health innovation and looking for an exciting opportunity to learn about the innovation process? Then join us at Impact Challenge on March 15-16, 2024!

Impact Challenge is an annual event held during the spring semester at Karolinska Institutet. It provides students with the opportunity to collaborate in interprofessional teams, tackling a real health challenge. The teams will have the chance to meet user groups and learn more about the design thinking methodology.

Following an internal evaluation of the proposals, the StratNeuro board has decided to award SEK 100,000 to the proposal sent by Onur Dagliyan at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, to host a two months' visit in his laboratory by Cristian Ripoli, Associate Professor at the Department of Neuroscience of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Rome, Italy.

Dementia is a brain disease that affects mental capacities such as the individual’s memory, language, or capacity to understand and deal with emotions. Amongst the different types of dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is a relatively frequent dementia. Recently, there has been an interest in understanding better whether sex and gender play a role in DLB. Two recent publications from researchers at Karolinska Institutet addressed this question on sex differences in DLB.

Are you a KI student who wants to apply for a job in Life Science but is unsure how to get the job? Then you are welcome to attend the workshop "How to land a job" with career coach Niclas Lindqvist from Trygghetsstiftelsen.

This spring, the university management will be visiting KI’s departments in a series of meetings, the focus of which will be not only their activities but also how we at KI can strengthen dialogue and cooperation going forward. The meetings series kicked off with KI DS and LIME on 17 January.

Minister for Health Care Acko Ankarberg Johansson had a busy schedule when she visited Karolinska Institutet, where she spent an afternoon discussing research conditions and how to create sustainable infrastructures that can increase the interaction between education, research, development and healthcare today and tomorrow.

Five new members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (KVA) have been elected at the General Meeting held on 17 January 2024. Marie Carlén, Karolinska Institutet, Love Dalén and Hanna Johannesson, Stockholm University, were elected new members of the Academy's Class for Biosciences.

Lisa Westerberg has been appointed Professor of Experimental Immunology at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology from 1 January 2024.

New educational administrator at the Division of Family Medicine and Primary Care, NVS.

Professor Per-Olof Berggren has been awarded a ERC Proof of Concept grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The funding will be used to advance a technology in which islets of Langerhans are transplanted into the anterior chamber of the eye and employed as a screening tool to identify novel pharmaceutical treatments for diabetes.

One in three children who suffer from bacterial meningitis live with permanent neurological disabilities due to the infection. This is according to a new epidemiological study led by Karolinska Institutet and published in leading medical journal JAMA Network Open.

Hi Marianne Reimers Wessberg, doctoral student at the Division of Clinical Geriatrics. On February 2 you will defend your thesis "Aspects on heart failure and drug treatment in geriatric patients". What is the main focus of the thesis?

This is a summary of the information meeting that Maria Eriksdotter, the former Dean of KI South, together with the departmental heads of MedH and BioNut as well as the project manager, held on 16 January on Zoom addressing all staff at BioNut and MedH.

In Biomedicum there is 29 coffee machines and in 2023 we drank more than 517 000 cups of coffee or tea.
That is almost 400 cups per person and year.

The most popular machine is placed on floor 4 between quarter B and C with almost 30 000 cups served. The least popular machine is placed in floor 8, in the larger 'fika'-area with only 4000 cups.

FM provides daily maintenance of the coffee machines by cleaning and refilling coffee, tea, milk, suger, cups and more.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and SciLifeLab demonstrate in a new study published in iScience how they can identify substances that can deactivate an enzyme responsible for chemotherapy resistance in cancer cells. These results can have importance to improve chemotherapy effectiveness for cancer patients.

Today, KI uses the Pythagoras facility system for our rented premises and the administration is handled by the Facility department (FA).

During 2023, FA has worked on implementing a new web platform (Pythagoras Web, PW) that replaces the older web platform PIM. (PIM will continue to be available)

Since 31 January 2022, the EU-wide Regulation 536/2014, also known as the Clinical Trials Regulation (CTR), applies to clinical trials of medicines for humans. The CTR applies regardless of whether the trials are commercial or not, and thus also covers academic research.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have used DNA origami, the art of folding DNA into desired structures, to show how an important cell receptor can be activated in a previously unknown way. The result opens new avenues for understanding how the Notch signalling pathway works and how it is involved in several serious diseases. The study is published in Nature Communications.

During the Christmas holidays, a freezer failure occurred in the Neo building on KI's Flemingsberg campus. The automatic filling of the cryotanks with liquid nitrogen was interrupted for an unknown reason. As a result, the temperature in 16 of 19 cryogenic tanks rose and large amounts of biological research material have been destroyed. An investigation with internal and external experts is now underway to find out how this failure could have happened.

Tips from Grants Office regarding current calls

Hi Charlotta Elleby, doctoral student at the Division of Family Medicine and Primary Care. On February 1 you will defend your thesis "Identifying individuals at risk of fragility fractures in a dental setting". What is the main focus of the thesis?

KI's agreement with Master Design, our supplier of profile products, expires on January 31. To be sure to get profile products delivered before then, orders must be placed in the webshop by January 25 at the latest.

To mechanistically understand what happens in the living body under physiological and pathological conditions, one critically relies on a non-invasive high spatiotemporal resolution research tool. It has been challenging to create such a tool and tremendous time and efforts have been committed to solve this difficult task.

From January 1, 2024, researchers at KI can publish articles open access without having to pay a publication fee in all journals from the publishers Frontiers, MJS Publishing (formerly Medical Journals Sweden) and PLOS. The agreements are financed by the Swedish Research Council, Forte, Formas and Vinnova.

Co-prescribing potency drugs such as Viagra and organic nitrates for angina is associated with a 35 to 40 percent increased risk of death and about 70 percent higher risk of heart attack and heart failure. This is according to a Swedish registry study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC). The Swedish researchers are now urging caution.

From the jubilee year of 2010 and onwards, Karolinska Institutet awards medals to people who have made special efforts in support of KI’s activities. There are three categories: the Gold Medal, the Grand Silver Medal and the Silver Medal. Medals are awarded in conjunction with various academic ceremonies.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects over 10% of adults worldwide. Mental health is an important yet under-recognized issue in patients with CKD. Depression is common and related to poor prognosis in CKD patients, but previous research has primarily focused on dialysis patients, leading to an insufficient understanding of depression in earlier stages of CKD.

Women who suffer depression during or after pregnancy have a higher risk of death by both natural and unnatural causes, a new study of childbirth in Sweden published in The BMJ reports. The increased risk peaks in the month after diagnosis but remains elevated for as long as 18 years afterwards.

Welcome to Christina-Evmorfia Kampitsi's doctoral thesis defence on Friday 26 January 2024 at 9:00 in Petrénsalen, Nobels väg 12 B, KI.

Congratulations to Ruixin Lu, Michael Dismorr, Natalie Glaser and Ulrik Sartipy at the research group Thoracic Surgery. Their article, published in JACC: Advances June 2023, is of one of the Journal’s Top Ten Original Research Articles for 2023.

Maternal suicide is an alarming public health issue and the second most common cause of death during the postnatal period. New research from the Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM) shows that mothers with clinically diagnosed perinatal depression had a three times higher risk of suicidal behavior compared to mothers without perinatal depression.

CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) is led by a number of EU organizations with the aim of advancing how research is assessed in order to maximise its quality, transparency and impact. KI has now signed the agreement together with a number of other Swedish universities.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have shown that nasal drops with IgA antibodies can protect mice from SARS-CoV-2 infection. The results imply a new way to protect individuals at high risk from different variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and possibly other infections. The study is published in PNAS.

New doctoral student at the Division of Physiotherapy, NVS.

New doctoral student at the Division of Physiotherapy, NVS.

Women with autoimmune disease are more likely to suffer from depression during pregnancy and after childbirth; conversely, women with a history of perinatal depression are at higher risk of developing autoimmune disease, a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry reports.

Psychological gender differences persist in countries with improved living conditions, according to a study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science by researchers from Karolinska Institutet. Some differences become larger and others smaller as women seem to benefit more than men from improved living conditions. The findings confirm to some extent the so-called gender paradox.

UTokyo-KI LINK has been awarded the international collaborative research program ASPIRE- A grant from Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED)

Do you feel overwhelmed by all information at the start of the semester? No worries! The University Library has gathered tips to help you stay on top of things.

The National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST), part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently partnered with Science to survey the questions that still need to be answered if we are to advance nanotechnology in society.

Sophie Erhardt, professor in Experimental Psychiatry, KI, receives a 3 million SEK grant from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, for the development of drugs targeting immune-induced cognitive decline and psychosis. This funding marks a significant step in Professor Erhardt's pursuit of innovative solutions within the realm of mental health. The project stands among the ten distinguished Swedish scientific life science initiatives honored with grants.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet have discovered that the gut microbiome can influence how well people respond to mRNA COVID vaccines. The study, published in the journal npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, suggests that certain bacteria in the gut can enhance the immune response to the vaccine, whereas other bacteria may weaken it.

We are proud to contribute to the paper ‘Transcriptional determinants of lipid mobilization in human adipocytes’ from the Mikael Ryden and Niklas Mejhert lab at the Department of Medicine Huddinge, Karolinska Institutet.

Due to increased rents from our landlords, the rents will be increased from January 1st, 2024.

Young people who have had surgery for obesity do not improve their mental health despite significant and permanent weight loss. However, bariatric surgery increases the risk of early alcohol problems. This is according to the largest long-term study of young people who have undergone bariatric surgery, conducted at Lund University and Karolinska Institutet, among others.

Karolinska Institutet is the university from which the most articles on physical activity in rheumatoid arthritis have been published since the beginning of the 2000s.

Hi John Ressman, doctoral student at the Division of Physiotherapy. On January 26 you will defend your thesis "The Single Leg Squat in clinical testing. Aspects of reliability, validity, and associated factors". What is the main focus of the thesis?

A common practice in the Nordic countries has sparked conversations on social media, namely to let babies nap outside in strollers all year around including in subzero tempratures. Pictures and videos on social media of babies sleeping outside have left some viwers wondering if it is safe and if there are any benefits. Tobias Alfvén was invited to Swedish Radio to answer some of the questions around the practice.

Many Swedes live with fatty liver – and it doesn’t have to be dangerous. But for some, it kicks off a course of disease in which persistent inflammation leads to cirrhosis. Medicinsk Vetenskap has talked to researchers who look after the liver – the behemoth of the belly that has a somewhat magical ability to recover, along with enormous overcapacity.

In an unbiased cross-checking of a wide array of health registers, an exciting connection emerged. Could a common and cheap blood lipid lowering drug from the standard repertoire help patients with the liver diseases PSC? This question is now the subject of a clinical trial.