News archive

A new study from Karolinska Institutet shows that long-term exposure to air pollution contributes to millions of deaths in India. The research, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, emphasises the need for stricter air quality regulations in the country.

Our nine teams in Pep@work have made outstanding efforts among the 38 competing teams! The best part, of course, is that many have been more active than usual and had fun with their colleagues

The Bergendorff scholarship was founded in 2022 in honor of Anders Bergendorff, the former program director of the master programme in Toxicology at IMM. This scholarship supports summer internships for students at the program, and the awardees present their projects at the annual Bergendorff seminar.

Jennie Eldh Bastman, the environmental and sustainability representative at Biomedicum, talks about the environmental initiatives that have been carried out throughout the year.

What exactly does an HR employee at NVS do? We had a little chat with the HR group.

The allocation of government funding for 2025 is now planned, budgeted and decided.

This autumn’s major allocation of external research grants from the larger Swedish research councils, the Heart-Lung foundation and Cancerfoundation means that many of our researchers at the Department of Medicine Solna (MedS) can continue their important research, while others can start new projects.

Advanced Medicinal Therapy Products, ATMP, span broadly over medical fields and the aim of this symposium is to enhance networking within ATMP and to get a flavor of academic and commercial development of ATMPs in Stockholm and Sweden. NextGenNK and CCRM Nordic are inviting you to a mini-symposium with the focus on ATMP on January 22, 2025.

Moon landings, worms and micro-RNA are just three shared interests held by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who told the story of how they first aimed for the stars and achieved a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in their Nobel lectures with humor and erudition.

Max Kleijberg, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Nursing, and Markus Saarijärvi, lecturer at the Department of Nursing, receive a total of 3.3 million SEK in grants from Forte.

For the first time, the course 'Sustainable Health and Agenda 2030' is being offered here at KI. It is part of the Doctoral Programme in Health Care Science (PUF-V).

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) have developed AI-driven warning technology capable of detecting infections up to 24 hours before symptoms appear.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the University of Gothenburg have identified two types of metabolic-associated fatty liver disease – a liver-specific type and a systemic type that affects other organs and tissues. The discovery could lead to improved diagnosis and treatment of this growing patient group. Two studies are published back-to-back in Nature Medicine.

On 5 November, KI submitted its final batch of material to the Swedish Research Council’s national evaluation of preclinical medical and pharmaceutical science for 2024-25. Seven universities are participating in the process, which aims to provide a national picture of the research field.

A delegation from Karolinska Institutet (KI), led by KI President Annika Östman Wernerson, travelled to Uganda and Rwanda in November 2024. The delegation visited Makerere University in Uganda and met with representatives from the University of Rwanda and the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda, emphasizing Karolinska Institutet’s commitment to global collaborations, which rely on strong relationships, contextual knowledge, and robust infrastructure.

MedS Day 2024 gave employees and affiliates at the Department of Medicine Solna (MedS) a long-awaited opportunity to meet and take part in the department’s ongoing activities.

According to a study published in Nature Communications, researchers at the Department of Laboratory Medicine, Karolinska Institutet have made a significant leap in drug discovery and development with a new method called CeTEAM. This approach connects how drugs bind to their targets inside cells with the effects they produce, offering a clearer understanding of how a drug works.

Call for scientific proposals for the Swedish Suicide Research Conference 2025 is open. The conference will take place on May 6–7 in Stockholm. The submission deadline is January 10.

Tips from Grants Office regarding current calls

One in ten adults in society suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD), a disease characterized by progressive loss of kidney function. Altered kidney function can impact on the risk/benefit of many medications. People with advanced chronic kidney disease have to be careful about the medications they take because their kidneys don't work as well as they should. Some medications are not safe for them to take at all while others require dose adjustments or strict monitoring for safety.

As a member of the Cochrane Governing Board, Emma Persad represents Sweden and the Nordics, advocating for open science, international collaboration, and access to reliable research. Through her work, she aims to make healthcare more evidence-based and improve outcomes for the most vulnerable populations.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered how the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, manipulates human proteins to replicate and evade the immune system. The results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Amaia Calderon-Larrañaga and Weili Xu are recipients of the Elderly and Ageing 2024 Grant from Forte and will both receive funding for the period 2025-2027.

Professor Camilla Björkegren at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Karolinska Institutet, is awarded a distinguished professor grant within natural and engineering sciences by the Swedish Research Council. Out of 83 applications, four grants are awarded to four different universities.

Natalie von der Lehr, science journalist and molecular biologist, visited GPH a few weeks ago and held a workshop on writing popular science summaries, an important component of any grant application. We have summarized the highlights from the workshop and share her best tips below

Rosaria Galanti is Professor Emerita of Epidemiology at GPH, whose research interests include tobacco use and the use of new tobacco-free nicotine products among young people. New products such as white snus are often marketed as 'tobacco-free' despite containing high doses of nicotine, which is produced from tobacco and are often marketed as a fresher alternative to snus with appealing flavours.

In November, Anna Mia Ekström was invited as one of the few external advisors to the Africa CDC’s Continental Research Prioritization Framework Workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The workshop aimed to validate a comprehensive set of tools and frameworks designed to enhance health research, identify priority diseases, map research capacities, establish ethical guidelines, and improve governance and coordination of health research across Africa.

During November and December, KI's bachelor programmes representatives participated in three fairs across the country: the Kunskap & Framtid fair in Gothenburg and the Saco Student fair in Kista and Malmö. Tens of thousands of high school graduates attended to get inspiration for their future careers.

Congratulations to the researchers at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB) who received a total of nearly 120 million SEK from the Swedish funding agencies (FORTE, the Swedish Research Council, the Swedish Cancer Society and the Erling-Persson Foundation)!

New lecturer at the division of occupational therapy.

Over the past decade, the proportion of residents in Stockholm County who identify as bisexual has nearly doubled. The younger generations are driving the trend and many of them have previously identified as heterosexual. This is according to a study published in JAMA Network Open by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with the Centre for Epidemiology and Community Medicine within Region Stockholm in Sweden.

On Friday 13 December, you have the opportunity to experience one of the atmospheric Lucia celebrations that take place at different times and locations around KI.

PhD student Birte Schmid from the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Karolinska Institutet reflects on her enriching experience at the BonnBrain3 Meeting on "States – Behavior, Neural Circuits and Codes."

Many of KI’s students have similar lives. Studying, hanging out with friends, exercising, and perhaps being involved in the student union or section. For some, the factor of having children is added to the equation. What is it like to study full-time and be a parent at the same time?

”Pioneering physiology and pharmacology to drive next generation discoveries and health care.” - This is FyFa's new vision that is now being launched, together with FyFa's mission. The entire department has been involved in the development.

Congratulations to Daniel Andersson, Jacob Karlsson, Malin Jonsson Fagerlund and Mattias Carlström!

New research from Karolinska Institutet and Columbia University shows that the heart has a mini-brain – its own nervous system that controls the heartbeat. A better understanding of this system, which is much more diverse and complex than previously thought, could lead to new treatments for heart diseases. The study, conducted on zebrafish, is published in Nature Communications.

When you hear the words mucus and snot, you might think of colds, snails or drooling babies. But the runny, sometimes sticky substance often plays a vital role in our lives. And mucus also has potential to be a medicine.

Today, women with oestrogen-sensitive breast cancer receive anti-hormonal therapy. Researchers now show that postmenopausal women with low-risk tumours have a long-term benefit for at least 20 years, while the benefit was more short-term for younger women with similar tumour characteristics who had not yet gone through the menopause. The results are reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI).

Patients with frontotemporal dementia often lack the ability to empathize. A study at Karolinska Institutet has now shown that these patients do not show the same brain activity as healthy individuals when they witness the pain of others, a finding that it is hoped will increase understanding of this specific dementia disease.

On a gray November day, a happy bunch of GPH PhD students visited the Hagströmer Library, KI’s world-class collection of historic medical literature chronicling the emergence of medicine and health sciences in Europe as they exist today.

The Swedish Research Council has awarded seven different grants, including doctoral programme grants within register-based research and project grants for research on antimicrobial resistance. The grant decisions apply to eleven researchers at KI.

At GPH, we currently have 115 doctoral students. Recently, three of our PhD students - Carl Otto Schell, Kritika Dixit, and Bakare Ayobami Adebayo, successfully completed their doctoral studies. In this section, they share their experiences as doctoral students at GPH, discuss their research, the challenges they faced, and their plans for future.

On 12 November, Prof. Manfred Wuhrer from Leiden University Medical Center, the Netherlands, presented a hybrid Eurolife Distinguished Lecture entitled Glycomics of human immune responses hosted by Karolinska Institutet.

The Swedish Heart Lung Foundation (Hjärt-Lungfonden) has awarded Jonas F. Ludvigsson a 3-year-grant for the project ”Inflammatory bowel disease, inflammation and risk of cardiovascular disease”.

On 26 November an experiment in a sounding rocket was launched at Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden by a research group at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology (MTC) at Karolinska Institutet. The researchers aims to collect data for a study that examines how a type of immune cell, T cells, are affected by lack of gravity, called microgravity.

KI researchers Emma R. Andersson, Volker Lauschke, Gustaf Edgren and Alireza Salami have been awarded the European Research Council’s prestigious consolidation grant and a total of approximately EUR 8 million (about SEK 90 million) for their research.

A new thesis from Karolinska Institutet shows the significant societal economic burdens posed by two chronic inflammatory gastrointestinal diseases; eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) and microscopic colitis (MC). Both diseases cause long-term inflammation in the digestive system and can lead to additional health problems.

On the occasion of International World AIDS Day, Lars E. Eriksson was invited by Springer Nature to write a 'Behind the Paper' blog post about an article published a few years ago on the development and use of a short scale for measuring stigma among people living with HIV.

Stockholm continues to be an important center for Swedish Parkinson's research. For 2025, the Parkinson's Foundation has decided to provide funding for more than 40 new projects that can help Swedes with Parkinson's disease, of which 14 research projects are conducted at Karolinska Institutet.