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Paolo Parini is a researcher in cardiometabolic diseases and senior Physician at Endocrinology Clinic. Since September 2015 his professorship is shared between Department of Medicine, Huddinge and Department of Laboratory Medicine.

In recent decades much hope was based on the development of personalised drug treatments, in which genetic tests determine the choice and optimal dose of medication for each individual patient. However, the real breakthrough is still to be seen, and now researchers at Karolinska Institutet show in two separate scientific papers that many more gene variants affect how a person responds to medication than previously thought – and thus that today’s analytical tools are too coarse.

The number of articles citing the lyrics of Bob Dylan in the biomedical literature has increased exponentially since 1990, according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet. The results are being published in the special Christmas issue of The BMJ.

A recently published study from the Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM) at Karolinska Institutet shows that exposure to noise during pregnancy can damage the child’s hearing, with an 80 percent increase in risk in occupational environments with particularly high decibel levels. The results strongly indicate that pregnant women should not be exposed to loud noise.

Karl Deisseroth is a professor at Stanford, where his group has developed two spectacular scientific techniques – optogenetics and Clarity. He has also been working since 2013 at Karolinska Institutet, which has just invested in a Clarity facility.

Head of Department Professor Marie Arsenian Henriksson is featured researcher of the month at The Swedish Childhood Cancer Foundation (Barncancerfonden).

Nobel Week is soon to come, bringing together all the Nobel Laureates in Stockholm. One of them, Tomas Lindahl, one of this year's three Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, made many of his pioneering discoveries at Karolinska Institutet.

A population of ‘stop cells’ in the brainstem is essential for the ability of mice to stop their locomotion, according to a new study by scientists at Karolinska Institutet. In an article published in the journal Cell, they report a brainstem pathway specifically dedicated to enforce locomotor arrest: its selective activation stops locomotion, while its silencing favors it. The study thus identifies a novel descending modality essential for gating the episodic nature of locomotor behavior.