News archive

Karolinska Institutet's core facilities are generally highly rated by the users. This can be seen from the results of the open survey conducted in November and December 2021 on behalf of the Infrastructure Council. But there is still potential for improvement in areas such as websites and support given to clinical researchers, according to the working group behind the survey.

Researchers behind the science of how we move have been recognized with the The Brain Prize 2022. Ole Kiehn, from the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is one of three neuroscientists receiving the world's largest prize for brain research, awarded on a yearly basis by the Lundbeck Foundation.

While the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins has been harder to study than protein-coding genes, it has been shown to have vital physiological functions. Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have now developed new high-precision tools able to identify what these noncoding sequences do. The study, which is published in the journal Nature Genetics, may eventually contribute to the development of new, targeted drugs.

The February sun was glittering in the glazed facades when Karolinska Institutet welcomed Minister for Education Anna Ekström on Monday 28 February. Meanwhile, the situation grew gloomier in Ukraine, which was demonstrated by, amongst other things, a lecture in disaster medicine.

Fatigue, or severe tiredness and exhaustion, is a distressing condition for many patients with advanced cancer. Unfortunately, good pharmacological treatment options are limited, and the ones available come with a risk of side effects and/or habituation.

His excellency the Ambassador of Japan to Sweden, Masaki Noke, visited KI on 24th November, 2022, to explore the institution and world leading research ongoing at KI.

The Department of Global Public Health (GPH) has got two new doctoral student representatives; Soha el Halabi and Katrine de Angeles. They represent the students in meetings and committees at the department and work to help and support new and existing doctoral students.

The Selivanova's group at MTC recently established a multidisciplinary collaboration together with Dr. Marie-Stéphanie Aschtgen, microbiologist in the Henriques-Normark groups (also at MTC) to study the interplay between bacteria and cancer, focusing on how specific bacterial systems influence host tumor supressors. Together they recently got their first collaborative paper accepted in Oncogene, entitled "Enterobacteria impair host p53 tumor suppressor activity through mRNA destabilization".

Last week Reza Rasti obtained his doctoral degree after successfully defending his thesis titled ‘Point-of-care diagnostics of childhood central nervous system infections, with a focus on usability in low-resource settings'. The defence took place in lecture hall David in the Widerströmska building and joining via zoom from Uganda was his opponent Philippa Musoke, Professor at Makerere University.

On the 3rd of March, doctoral student Vanda had her half-time seminar online via Zoom and in Widerströmska huset. Vanda is a Mozambican healthcare practitioner specialising as a pediatric surgeon in Spain and is now using her experiences from clinical work into research in her thesis titled:
‘Acute pediatric injury in a low-resource African setting during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insight on injury epidemiology and care from the largest hospitals of Mozambique’

Nikolaos Christidis term commences in June 2022 and he will serve as President of the group during 2023-2024.

Caroline Ran, researcher at the Department of Neurosicence, has been awarded the Harold Wolff-John Graham Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements in headache research. The award, sponsored by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), amounts to 1000 USD, plus 200 USD in subsistence allowance to speak at AAN's annual meeting in April 2022.

Preprint servers are a mixed bag of important research papers and articles of more dubious quality. The Preprint Club sifts out the nuggets that are worthy of our attention – and has now been joined by scientists from Karolinska Institutet.

The Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund has decided to grant SEK 150 million in grants to Swedish childhood cancer research, of which SEK 60 million to a total of 32 researchers at Karolinska Institutet.

COMMENTARY Last night’s military aggression against Ukraine must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, comments the KI president Ole Petter Ottersen on the military aggression against Ukraine.

Johan von Schreeb, professor of global disaster medicine and director of the Centre for Research on Health Care in Disasters at Karolinska Institutet, has been named director of KI’s newly established Centre for Health Crises. The aim is to create a center based on KI’s knowledge and capability, that finds connections between groups and people, with the aim of increasing preparedness for a new pandemic or health crisis.

The EU has granted Karolinska Institutet support for several new projects under the Horizon Europe programme, the Union's most important funding programme for research and innovation. The largest of them is PARC, which will contribute to the safer management of chemicals and improve the dialogue between researchers and authorities.

Threats or violence in the workplace is never acceptable. Hatred, threats and harassment against researchers, but also against other occupational groups, is unfortunately not a new phenomenon but has lately also increased, especially among employees working with research related to COVID-19. This is of course a very unfortunate development and KI wants to raise awareness of the support that is available to you as an employee.

In a new study conducted by researchers at the group Vascular Surgery, Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, osteomodulin was identified as a novel biomarker for vascular calcification. The results of the study was recently published in the journal Clinical and Translational Medicine.

When she was 14 years old Jessica Strid was treated for cancer and was told that it would be difficult for her to get pregnant. Today she has two children. ”I am very grateful”, she says.

Many young people whose fertility have been impaired due to cancer treatment can today be helped to become parents. Kenny Rodriguez-Wallberg, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Oncology and Pathology at Karolinska Institutet and Senior Consultant at Karolinska University Hospital, answers six common questions.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows how certain RNA molecules control the repair of damaged DNA in cancer cells, a discovery that could eventually give rise to better cancer treatments. The study is published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The EU-funded research network Vaccelerate has now opened a European volunteer-registry of study participants for research on COVID-19 vaccines. The aim of this initiative is to boost the capacity for clinical studies on COVID-19 vaccines in the EU, but also to support vaccine research in future pandemics.

Depression is a common and serious mental health condition. It causes a wide variety of symptoms, such as feeling hopeless and sad, and losing interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities. To be diagnosed with depression, symptoms must last for at least two consecutive weeks. At its worst, this mental condition can lead to suicide. It is a worldwide psychiatric illness with a wide range of ages of onset, and it occurs about twice as often in women than men.

The major genetic risk variant for severe COVID-19, one we inherited from Neandertals, is associated with a 27 percent lower risk of HIV infection. This is according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany published in the journal PNAS.

Little has been known to date about how the immune system’s natural killer (NK) cells detect which cells have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. An international team of scientist led by researchers from Karolinska Institutet now shows that NK cells respond to a certain peptide on the surface of infected cells. The study, which is published in Cell Reports, is an important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of how the immune system reacts to COVID-19.

KI researcher Lu Yi has been awarded 1.5 million euros from the prestigious European Research Council Starting Grants. The funds will go toward research on different subtypes of depression with the goal of finding treatments that work for more people.

The Thoracic Surgery research group at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery at Karolinska Institutet receives a 15 million SEK donation from the Schörling Foundation. The purpose of the donation is to enforce the development of cardiothoracic surgical technology and methodology and the related research by the group.

You are the same person inside, although your body is ageing and your memory failing. Professor Maria Eriksdotter hopes to add to our knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease. But she also wants to fight ageism. “The status of the elderly needs to be raised,” she says.

Spider silk is Nature’s high-performance fiber as it combines high tensile strength and large extensibility. A research group at Karolinska Institutet has developed a new and scalable method for producing spider silk proteins and are aiming to scale up the spinning process. Sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based products are needed since the environmental pollution caused by the exploitation of these limited resources is significant.

Every day, people are exposed to large number of pollutants, but the problem of how to assess the dangers of the chemical “cocktail effect” has long frustrated both scientists and public authorities. A collaborative study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Science now presents a new strategy that combines population studies with experiments using cell and animal models.

Karolinska Institutet (KI) president Ole Petter Ottersen’s term of office expires on 28 February 2023. The KI University Board (Konsistoriet) has therefore decided to begin an open recruitment process to propose a president and appoint a vice-president to take up office on 1 March 2023.

The Best Practice Guidance regarding improved use of technology in dementia care was developed a few years ago, including researchers from the CACTUS research group. In December, an updated version of the Best Practice Guidance was published.

Sweden is one of the few countries that have removed the dental health recommendation to give prophylactic antibiotics to people at a higher risk of infection of the heart valves, so-called infective endocarditis. Since the recommendation was removed in 2012, there has been no increase in this disease, a registry study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases shows.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet have analysed blood and sperm samples from healthy parents to children with genetic syndromes and the results indicate that germline mosaicism is underestimated as a cause to syndromes and that the level of the genetic variant is higher in sperm than in blood.  The study was recently published in Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine.

Erik Vismer and his wife sought help from an IVF clinic to get children. What they didn’t expect was the effort and time that the process demanded from them. Read an in-depth article series from KI’s Swedish popular science magazine.

According to the WHO, almost 50 million couples worldwide are involuntarily childless while demand for assisted fertilisation is expected to grow as treatments have become both more effective and more widely accessible. Read the first article from a in-depth series about infertility from KI’s Swedish popular science magazine.

Karolinska Institutet will soon be offering a preparatory course for doctors trained outside the EU/EES. The course is being arranged at the request of the Swedish Medical Association, which has been awarded a grant of SEK 5.7 million from the Swedish Public Employment Service to help overseas-trained doctors pass the proficiency test for licensing in Sweden.

New investments are now being implemented to strengthen Karolinska Institutet’s position as a pioneering research university. Many of these investments are aimed at more junior researchers and include the KI Research Incubator (KIRI), a virtual forum for multidisciplinary collaboration. Two other initiatives are also in the pipeline – a mentor and coaching programme and a new network to enhance the qualification prospects for female researchers and teachers.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet sheds new light on how diabetes causes tissue damage when oxygen levels drop, and point to the repression of a protein complex as a possible treatment target for diabetes complications. The findings are published in the journal eLife.

In a new study published in Nature Metabolism, KI researchers show how disturbances in the energy metabolism in human fat cells, can lead to the development of inflammation and insulin resistance.

The study, led by Professor Per Uhlén, presents a model and mechanism for how the risk gene CACNA1C can affect brain function and the risk of psychiatric illness.

Hopefully we are nearing the end of the pandemic. But the virus is still there and scientists expect that new variants may emerge. Making us more sick, however, is not on the viral agenda.

Using a technique called spatial transcriptomics, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have analysed the gene expression in the mouse colon and created a map showing where in the tissue individual genes are expressed. When they superimposed previously known human transcription data onto the map, the researchers gained new insights into inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

On November 17, Occupational Science Europe (OSE) organized its first online conference: ”Everyday life: living and doing in a changing society”. The organization has regularly arranged conferences at various sites, but in these pandemic times the conference went online, something that would prove to be successful in many ways.

In a new study published in Science, researchers at Yale University, in collaboration with researchers at Karolinska Institutet, have developed a technique that gives very precise information about the location of activated and inactivated genes in a specific tissue. This can provide important knowledge about how different tissues develop and how epigenetic regulation contributes to the development of disease.

In the largest funding round from the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation (Hjärt-Lungfonden), researchers at Karolinska Institutet will share a total of 95,776,000 SEK. All in all, approximately 70 projects at KI will benefit from the grant.

Over the course of two half-days students, researchers, & implementers from a range of disciplines gathered online to examine matters of inequity and vulnerability in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Nordic countries. The event was hosted by the Nordic Pandemic Network, an interdisciplinary collaboration on COVID-19 & its impact in the Nordic region, which KI is a part of along with The University of Copenhagen, Roskilde University, University of Stavanger & Hanken School of Economics.

In February, the renovation of the property Fysiologen will begin as part of the life science initiative being conducted at Karolinska Institutet and Hagastaden. The building will be an attractive and modern office environment and laboratory for new operators working in medicine and health and is expected to be completed in 2023.

It is estimated that more than 10% of the world’s population live with a psychiatric disorder, with significant impacts on health as well as major social, human rights and economic consequences in all countries of the world.