News archive

Predictions are becoming more and more a part of our lives, and they are becoming increasingly useful in medical science as the science evolves. Increased understanding of disease and its treatments allows us to use predictions based on predictive biomarker signatures to optimize treatment outcomes for increasingly specific subject groups.

Early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease requires reliable and cost-effective screening methods. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now discovered that a type of sugar molecule in blood is associated with the level of tau, a protein that plays a critical role in the development of severe dementia. The study, which is published in Alzheimer's & Dementia, can pave the way for a simple screening procedure able to predict onset ten years in advance.

The risk of developing cardiovascular disease is lower in people with obesity who have a genetic predisposition for high BMI than people with obesity influenced mainly by environmental factors such as lifestyle, researchers from Karolinska Institutet report in eClinicalMedicine.

In an experimental study published in Science Signaling, researchers at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology have studied basic mechanisms for cellular communication along a highly conserved pathway that regulates embryonic development and stem cell regulation. Based on the published data, we have already created new biosensors that present important tools for future drug development efforts and molecular screening.

The web page Research Support & Services has recently been developed to provide an overview of the support and specialised competences available to all researchers, both at their departments and at other units at KI.

The group of expert coordinators at the Centre for Health Crises keeps growing. The expert coordinators manage the work that is done within their field of expertise. The latest area of expertise to be added to the Centre is laboratory and diagnostic preparedness, with Jessica Alm as expert coordinator.

Same support, different name. The Student Health Centre at Karolinska Institutet has been renamed Student Wellbeing Centre to better reflect the services they provide.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sepsis has a way of flying under the radar. Public awareness of the life-threatening disease is low, and official statistics are misleading. Now researchers are using special alarm systems and AI to increase detection. This article is part of an in-depth feature from KI's popular science magazine Medicinsk Vetenskap.

Barbro Westerholm passed away on 13 March. She was born in Stockholm in 1933 and graduated with a medical degree from Karolinska Institutet in 1959. She then went on to earn her PhD in 1964 with a thesis on the in vitro release of histamine and 5-hydroxy tryptamine before becoming a docent at KI. She is known for being the director general of the National Board of Health and Welfare from 1979 to 1985 and for her engagement with HBTQI issues and the elderly, the “year-rich”.

Men who played football (soccer) in the Swedish top division until the mid 1900s had a higher risk of dementia than men from the general population, a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in The Lancet Public Health reports.

Region Stockholm has launched a new action plan for precision medicine in the region. The plan, which was devised in consultation with Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, will allow more patients to benefit from the research being done in the field of precision medicine.

A new study published in Nature reports that a technology known as spatial omics can be used to map simultaneously how genes are switched on and off and how they are expressed in different areas of tissues and organs. This improved technology, developed by researchers at Yale University and Karolinska Institutet, could shed light on the development of tissues, as well as on certain diseases and how to treat them.

Immunotherapy is an effective form of therapy for different types of cancer. However, for pancreatic cancer, its effect is limited and differs between men and women. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now found a possible explanation for this sex difference. The study, which is published in Cancer Research, reveals the presence of an immune cell in women with pancreatic cancer that obstructs the body’s immune response. The results can pave the way for a more sex-specific treatment.

During the pandemic, it became clear that children who contracted COVID-19 became less ill than adults. One hypothesis has been that common colds would give children immunity protecting against a severe form of the disease. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet are now able to show that OC43, one of the coronaviruses that cause common colds, boosts the immune response to COVID-19. The study, which is published in PNAS, could give rise to more tailored vaccine programmes for children and adults.

Two out of two audited specialist nursing programmes at Karolinska Institutet received a “high quality” rating in an evaluation by the Swedish Higher Education Authority (UKÄ) published on March 9. The specialisations are pre-hospital nursing and psychiatric care.

Readership of news articles written by KI researchers for The Conversation jumped 62 percent on the year in 2022. Since KI became a member two years ago, 43 researchers have penned over 42 articles, reaching around 3.8 million readers worldwide. “I have never experienced such a response to my research before,” says postdoc Filip Gedin.