News archive

In the 2023 announcement and assessment process, The Committee for Higher Education has announced five new members to the KI Pedagogical Academy, of which three represent NVS.

KI's Pedagogical Academy consists of people who have demonstrated pedagogical excellence. The competence of the members is seen as an important resource for continued educational development within KI.

KI researcher Stefan Skare receives funding from Barncancerfonden (the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund) for the development of motion-robust MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) methods for examining awake children with brain and spinal cord tumors. The project receives a total of SEK 3.9 million over three years.

Congratulations to Kristiina Tammimies, Eric Herlenius, Ulrika Ådén and Jakob Stenman, researchers at the Department of women's and children's health, who receive funding from the Swedish Research Council's call for proposals in medicine and health in 2023.

Next spring, the National Museum of Science and Technology will be opening a branch – called The Cell – in Stockholm’s Hagastaden, with KI as knowledge partner. The Cell will be a venue where science meets art through fascinating and inspirational activities designed to educate and engage more people in the development of tomorrow’s life science field.

The Committee for Research at Karolinska Institutet has decided on recipients from the Jonas Söderquist scholarship foundation for basic research in virology and immunology.

More and more researchers understand the importance of including the patients' experiences when planning scientific studies. Meet three people who have been hired as experts in their own illness.

The most effective way to prevent cervical cancer is to give HPV vaccines to both boys and girls, reports a collaborative study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet published in Cell, Host and Microbe. Beside personal immunity, such use of the vaccine also induces a herd immunity that will help to eradicate the carcinogenic virus types more quickly.

In the Swedish Research Council (VR) latest call for medicine and health and natural and engineering sciences 2023, research grants of 26 197 750 SEK were distributed to six researchers at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics for the years 2023-2028.

Congratulations to the eight researchers at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition (BioNut), Karolinska Institutet, who have received grants from the Swedish Research Council. Together they received more than SEK 27 million in total.

SSMF (Swedish Society for Medical Research) is aimed at researchers in all fields of medicine and supports basic research as well as applied research. In the autumn of 2023, seven researchers from Karolinska Institutet have been awarded grants.

In the Swedish Research Council's (VR) latest call for medicine and health 2023, research grants of 49 645 000 SEK were distributed to 11 researchers at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, for the years 2023-2028.

KI Housing is giving out cinema tickets to all tenants in the corridor/floor who have collaborated and achieved the cleanest common kitchen by the end of the competition period. The goal of this competition is to encourage collaboration in maintaining a welcoming and tidy kitchen!

KI researchers Anders Kvanta and Fredrik Lanner have been awarded a grant of SEK 10 million from the Erling-Persson Foundation for a clinical phase 1 trial on macular degeneration, a common age-related eye disease. By transplanting retinal cells from embryonic stem cells, the researchers hope to curb any further loss of vision and ultimately recover lost sight.

Karolinska Institutet and Professor Eleni Aklillu at the Department of Global Public Health leads a new initiative, that aims to enhance the oversight of medicines, medical devices, diagnostics, research ethics, and clinical trials in Tanzania and Rwanda.

MedTechLabs has granted SEK 35 million for two new medical technology research programmes. One will develop a new method for monitoring foetal oxygenation during labour. The other will develop a new method for early diagnosis of brain diseases using MR-Elastography.

The venue in Biomedicum was quickly filled with interested KI employees when the Centre of Excellence for Sustainable Health and the Centre for Health Crises welcomed them to the first policy lab on 26 October. The aim was to discuss and learn more together about how research can influence politics and society. The focus this time was on how the national Swedish political system is structured when it comes to health care issues and what ways there are to reach in with input from universities.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet are awarded close to SEK 93 million in Forte's annual open call for proposals. The projects, which will run until 2027, span all of Forte's areas - health, working life and welfare. This year, a total of 20 projects at KI have been granted funding.

People who have a higher biological age than their actual chronological age have a significantly increased risk of stroke and dementia, especially vascular dementia. These are the results of a study from Karolinska Institutet published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.

Marta Butrym from the Center for Infectious Medicine (CIM), at the department of Medicine, Huddinge (MedH), is defending her thesis "Novel vaccines and antiviral treatments for enterovirus induced infections and disease" on November 10 2023. Main supervisor is Malin Flodström Tullberg (MedH).

Frailty is an age-related state of physiological decline and is a strong predictor of disability and mortality. Researchers are trying to improve our understanding of the biology of frailty and to find ways of identifying frail older adults with the aim to improve individualized management of frailty.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden have uncovered the molecular logic underpinning the assembly of spinal circuits that control the speed of locomotion in adult zebrafish. The study has recently been published in Nature Neuroscience.

Women who receive a false positive mammography result are more likely to develop breast cancer over the subsequent 20 years, report researchers from Karolinska Institutet in a study published in JAMA Oncology. The risk is highest for women aged between 60 and 75 and who have low breast density.

In the Swedish Research Council's latest call, SEK 69 000 000 was awarded to 12 researchers at the Department of Medicine, Huddinge (MedH) for the years 2023-2028.

On 1 November 2023, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Health Minister Acko Ankarberg Johansson, visited Genomic Medicine Sweden (GMS) to learn about the work on precision medicine for improved cancer care. Some of the topics discussed included broad gene sequencing as part of personalised healthcare, as well as the treatment and accessibility of data.

Giulia Gaudenzi and Kelly Elimian are currently running a research project focused on assessing the diagnostic accuracy of rapid diagnostic test kits for detecting cholera in environmental water in comparison to standard diagnostic methods, such as culture and PCR, in Nigeria. They have conducted trainings in Nigeria on the use of these test kits.

A new publication in Science Advances from researchers at Karolinska Institutet shows how to use a specific cancer trait to improve treatment of pancreatic tumors.

We congratulate Professor Anna Martling, Research Group for Colorectal Surgery, Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, chief physician Tema Cancer, Karolinska University Hospital who has been named an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.

An early phase in the process of developing Alzheimer’s disease is a metabolic increase in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, report researchers from Karolinska Institutet in a study published in Molecular Psychiatry. The discovery opens up for new potential methods of early intervention.

Twelve international master students from ten countries received Karolinska Institutet's Global Scholarship during a ceremony in Aula Medica.

Staffan Josephsson, Division of Occupational Therapy, and Marie Kierkegaard, Division of Physiotherapy, receives nearly five million SEK each as project grant from Forte.

In a recent study published in Nature Communication, researchers from Karolinska Institutet and the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology have identified a new molecule in cells that is necessary for Ebola and Marburg viruses to infect and spread in the body.

A researcher at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, Karolinska Institutet, has received SEK 4.97 million in research grants from FORTE for a project on “A mHealth intervention to promote healthy lifestyle behaviours from the start of life: The Health4Life trial”.

The Institute of Environmental Medicine (IMM) has together with the Centre for Occupational and Environmental Medicine (CAMM) developed an accessible infrastructure to link environmental and occupational exposure with individual or population health for researchers at and outside Karolinska Institutet.

The National center for suicide research and prevention (NASP) has launched a fourth Swedish edition of "Preventing Suicide: A resource for media professionals." The resource is a translated and adapted version of the original edition from the World Health Organization (WHO) and addresses the effects of suicide reporting in the media and how professionals can report on suicide in a balanced and responsible manner.

A new thesis from Karolinska Institutet advocates end-of-life care that prioritizes the highest possible quality of life, avoids unnecessary or preventable risks and respects patient wishes.

Meet Anna Smed Sörensen, research group leader at the Division of Immunology and Allergy, Department of Medicine, Solna.

Meet Johan Askling, research group leader at the Division of Clinical Epidemiology (KEP), Department of medicine, Solna.

A collaborative study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet has charted the prevalence of severe physical symptom burden amongst Scandinavians for up to two years after a SARS-CoV-2 infection. Most affected were people who had a severe COVID-19 infection, while the researchers found no elevated prevalence of long COVID in those who had never been bedridden. The study is published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe.

The EPIC project (Eukaryotic Post-TranscrIptional Code) has been awarded a ERC Synergy Grant of EUR 10 million to be shared by Vicente Pelechano, Karolinska Institutet, and his two partners Kevin Verstrepen, VIB-KU Leuven, Belgium, and Julien Gagneur, Technical University of Munich, Germany.

The project CartoHostBug (Funtional cartography of intestinal host-microbiome interactions) has been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant of EUR 10 million, which is shared between four researchers, among them Eduardo Villablanca, senior researcher at Karolinska Institutet. The aim of the project is to map how disturbances in the gut microbiome can lead to inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer.

The project D2Smell (Digitising Smell: From Natural Statistics of Olfactory Perceptual Space to Digital Transmission of Odors) has been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant of EUR 11.8 million, which is shared between three researchers: Johan Lundström, Karolinska Institutet, Noam Sobel, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and Jonathan Williams, Max Planck Society, Germany. The interdisciplinary collaboration aims to digitally transfer scents to recreate them in another location.

The Aging Research Center (ARC) is an interdisciplinary research centre established in 2000 by Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University, and a division of the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at KI. ARC is now launching a new website which can be found at ki.se.

Times Higher Education in the UK has published its World University Rankings by Subject 2024, based on both hard data and reputation surveys. KI has improved its position in "Clinical and Health" both in Europe and globally.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet, among others, have developed a prognostic model that identifies the children most at risk of severe RSV infection. The study, published in Lancet Digital Health, can show which children will benefit most from new methods to prevent a serious infection.

Karolinska Institutet organizes every fall an Installation Ceremony where new professors at KI are presented and academic prizes are awarded. Leader for the research group Global Child Health and the Sustainable Development Goals Tobias Alfvén was one of the 17 new professors that were ceremoniously installed at KI on 12 October.

KI researcher Carl Sellgren has been awarded the Bjarne Ahlströms Minnesfonds pris 2023 (Bjarne Ahlström Memorial Fund Prize 2023) for his research in clinical neurology and how the loss of synapses (contacts between cells) in the brain could be a possible cause of schizophrenia.

On a sunny afternoon in October, several hundred people gathered in the Aula Medica at Karolinska Institutet in Solna. Study participants in the extensive SNAC-K study had been invited by the Stockholm Gerontology Research Center foundation and Karolinska Institutet (KI) to hear about the latest research findings from the study.

In recent years, there have been rapid advancements in the field of computational pathology, which refers to the application of computational methods in pathology workflows. Traditional pathology involves the study of diseases by examining tissues, organs, and bodily fluids. In computational pathology, digital pathology images are analyzed using computer algorithms to extract meaningful information.

Max Gordon, Associate Professor at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Karolinska Institutet, and Chief Physician at Danderyd Hospital, is awarded for his research on artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. The Swedish AI of the Year award (Årets AI svensk) is presented to a person who has contributed to the development and visibility of Swedish AI.