News archive

“We’re delighted, and the VR’s rating gives us even more leverage for our work,” says Anders Gustafsson, former vice president of KI, who has helped lead the work on the national evaluation of the quality of clinical research that has now been published by the Swedish Research Council (VR). The ALF evaluation is based on the agreement that regulates KI’s collaboration with Region Stockholm on medical training, clinical research and care development.

The StratNeuro Start-up Grant is intended to support outstanding Neuroscience researchers at the beginning of their careers, who have received a Vetenskapsrådet (VR) starting grant or a Karolinska Institutet faculty-funded assistant professor grant.en to all. Furthermore, the events should in some way relate to KI's activities.

Region Stockholm has been given a high-quality rating by the Swedish Research Council (VR) in its evaluation of the quality of clinical research and how it is transformed into patient and societal benefit. The evaluation is important in many respects, including to the distribution of government ALF (Agreement on Clinical Research and Training) funds.

Acetylcholine regulates blood flow, but the source of blood acetylcholine has been unclear. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered that certain T cells in human blood can produce acetylcholine, which may help regulate blood pressure and inflammation. The study, which is published in PNAS, also demonstrates a possible association between these immune cells in seriously ill patients and the risk of death.

Tips from Grants Office regarding current calls

Congratulations to all our newly admitted master students at KI.

Elin Larsson has been appointed to the Scientific and Technical Advisory Group (STAG) to the HRP, i.e. the UNDP/UNFPA/UNICEF/WHO/World Bank Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction.

We are looking for respondents for interviews about faculty’ experiences of active student participation in online doctoral courses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Three professors at Karolinska Institutet – Gonçalo Castelo-Branco, Maria Eriksson and Björn Högberg – have been awarded ERC Advanced Grants, one of the most prestigious and competitive EU funding schemes. The funds, totaling more than 8 million euros, will support the use of innovative basic research methods to further our understanding of disease mechanisms and the tiniest building blocks of DNA.

At KI, it is possible to establish research centres within special research areas. As from 1 March 2023, there are new guidelines and instructions for the formation and management of internal research centres and research centres controlled by KI.

Some employees see temporary files in OneDrive after moving from the home directory (H:).

Inspiration day for all employees on the theme "Balancing a changing and challenging world".
The day begins with a few words from the University Management followed by lectures on the theme by researchers at KI

The FM newsletter is sent to all employees working in Biomedicum about twice a semester and includes news from the Facility Management. 

In order to make the FM service even more efficient we have created a new team, Team Laboratory Service. Johanna Steen is head of the new team which is divided in two groups: Laboratory safety and Dishwashing and sterilization facility.

Meet our new co-worker Helena Hatziantoniou, responsible for the Supply Center in Biomedicum.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most prominent cause of dementia affecting millions of people worldwide. As the changes in the brain function starts 10-20 years before the clinical onset of Alzheimer’s disease, there is a strong interest in the identification of early markers that can be predictive of future mental health/cognitive decline. This may be something that some KI researchers are on the lookout for. Their latest study is now published in Nature Reviews Neurology.

Mareia Talvitie at the Vascular Surgery research group, Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, will defend her thesis "Abdominal aortic aneurysms : sex and gender disparities in surveillance, treatment and outcome" on March 31st, 2023.
Main Supervisor is Rebecka Hultgren.

A Scandinavian collaboration led by KI researchers shows that of individuals treated in specialist care for major depressive disorder (MDD), many have a severe prognosis, for instance experiencing recurrence, developing other psychiatric disorders, requiring inpatient treatment, and some even dying by suicide. This research was based on 273,000 individuals with MDD in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. The findings are published in Lancet Regional Health Europe.

Thirteen researchers at Karolinska Institutet have been awarded 54.9 million Swedish kronor from the Swedish Cancer Society. The foundation is distributing a total of SEK 124.3 million to 31 cancer researchers in Sweden.

Her involvement in health crises work at KI goes back to her role in one of the expert groups that were formed at KI during the COVID-19 pandemic, which proceeded what became the Centre for Health Crises. Now she is the latest in the group of expert coordinators at the Centre. Hedvig Glans wants to use her clinical and academic experience to improve the Centre’s competence in outbreak preparedness and response to infectious diseases.

The Svedberg prize 2023 is awarded to Simon Elsässer, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics at Karolinska Institutet, for his contributions to our understanding of epigenetic gene regulation.

SASUF 2030 is a strategic internationalisation project uniting 40 universities from Sweden and South Africa. In collaboration with the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa they now open a call.

Karolinska Institutet and the National University of Singapore offer a short-term exchange program for hosting 1-2 PhD students from each university per year.

As a teacher or course administrator, you can now create your course evaluations directly in Canvas. The goal is a smoother process and higher response rates.

Training the medical professionals of the future. Facilitating groundbreaking research. And working towards a knowledge-based society enriched by academic freedom. It’s a major undertaking that Annika Östman Wernerson shoulders as Karolinska Institutet’s 24th president. But she won’t be doing it alone – everyone at the university will have to do their bit.

In a new thesis from Karolinska Institutet, the focus was on the use of multiomics data in the discovery of disease signatures.

Tips from KI Grants Office about current calls.

Blind people are better at sensing their own heartbeats than sighted, shows a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Jagiellonian University in Poland. The study indicates that blindness leads to a heightened ability in feeling signals from the inner body. The findings are published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Samer Yammine at the Department of learning, informatics, management and ethics, LIME, is one of the top five finalists for the award 'Male entrepreneurship educator of the year' by Triple E Awards.

Women with mental illness, neuropsychiatric disability, or substance abuse are less likely to go for gynaecological smear tests for cervical cancer and run more than twice the risk of developing the disease. The findings are presented in Lancet Public Health by researchers from Karolinska Institutet, who stress the importance of proactively approaching these women as a preventative measure against cervical cancer.

How should healthcare providers identify bacteria or other pathogens in the blood of sepsis patients as quickly as possible? Volkan Özenci is focusing on this in his research. This article is part of an in-depth feature from KI's popular science magazine Medicinsk Vetenskap.

Some patients get sepsis because of hospital-acquired infections. A new digital system is now being implemented to find these patients by constantly scanning medical records for signs of sepsis. This article is part of an in-depth feature from KI's popular science magazine Medicinsk Vetenskap.

Funding for the Minor Field Studies program (MFS-program) has been withdrawn due to economic instability and the war in Ukraine. But, says Associate professor Claudia Hanson at the Department of Global Health at Karolinska Institutet, the withdrawal also indicates a moving away from global solidarity.

Helena Hervius Askling is new in the growing group of expert coordinators at the Centre for Health Crises. Her extensive experience in the field of infectious diseases and the topic of vaccine, as a medical doctor in infectious diseases, county medical officer and associate professor, will strengthen the centre’s competence in the field.

Medical sleep treatment may reduce self-harm in young people with anxiety and depression, an observational study from Karolinska Institutet suggests. The risk of self-harm increased in the months preceding melatonin prescription and decreased thereafter, especially in girls. The study is published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Three weeks have now passed since I became the president of Karolinska Institutet, and it’s been an intense time, but also an exciting and occasionally slightly overwhelming.

Karolinska Institutet maintains a strong position in several areas in QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) international subject rankings for universities. In the subject area Medicine, KI is ranked number seven globally, up from number twelve last year. KI also strengthens its position in the subject areas Biological Sciences, Nursing, Pharmacy and Pharmacology, and Psychology.

Professor Christian Giske has been appointed deputy chairperson of the Committee for Research effective immediately, following a decision by KI’s president. His mandate runs until Dec. 31, 2025.

From 1 April 2023, a coordinated examination service will be introduced for all examinations in KI's common examination halls. For you who work as a course coordinator, examiner and education administrator, this means that the course's routines need to be changed.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Department of Medicine, Solna, identified HOXC13-AS, a human skin-specific long noncoding RNA (lncRNA), that plays a crucial role in epidermal differentiation. The study is published in the journal Cell Death & Differentiation, highlighting lncRNA's physiological importance in the epidermal barrier's maintenance and reconstruction.

There are clear regional differences in the proportion of older adults receiving potentially inappropriate drug treatment in Sweden. In a study published in Frontiers of Pharmacology, researchers at Karolinska Institutet examine regional differences over time and show that these regional variations have decreased over the past decade.

On the occasion of World Oral Health Day, we are happy to share with you the first newsletter of the DELIVER (DELiberative ImproVEment of oRal care quality) project.

Caregivers want patients to feel cared for. This, according to a new doctoral thesis from Karolinska Institutet, is one reason why they still give treatments that provide no benefit.

Since we started with the Exit poll in 2008, a lot has happened, as reflected in the results from the Exit poll, which show how more and more doctoral students are satisfied with their doctoral education.

A nationwide Swedish study including over 10,000 cases of cholesteatoma, a lesion in the middle ear, shows a strong hereditary component to the disease.

Researchers at the Department of Oncology-Pathology have together with researchers from The European Molecular Biology Laboratory published a paper in Nature Chemical Biology where they developed a method that can identify important differences between proteins in an unbiased way.

Do not use the fume hoods and ventilated units on March 29 between 18.00-24.00 in ANA Futura due to service maintenance to the ventilation.

Just over two years ago, Arne Persson had a bad fall while walking his dog in the woods. He struck his coccyx badly but was able to get home. The pain just grew and grew over the next few days, so in the end he went to A&E at the hospital. After an X-ray, he was sent home because nothing was broken. This article is part of an in-depth feature from KI's popular science magazine Medicinsk Vetenskap.

While there are currently a dozen approved AI systems for breast cancer screening, it has been difficult to evaluate their clinical performance objectively. Now, however, there is a Swedish validation platform ready to compare how well AI systems detect signs of breast cancer – and its development has been led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet.

Petra Kormo’s second baby was born on Wednesday, 4 January 2017. Everything went well with the birth, but Petra developed a fever after she arrived home. She felt weaker and sicker for every day that passed. This article is part of an in-depth feature from KI's popular science magazine Medicinsk Vetenskap.