News archive

Just over 12 months ago, the Stockholm Trio University Alliance was launched. The University Alliance between the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University and KTH has been extended and further developed within several areas over the course of the year. Joint representation in Brussels is a vision that is set to be realised this autumn.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have developed a new method for analysing intact tumour samples in 3D on a molecular level. The study is a collaboration with Karolinska University Hospital and is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Now the researchers are planning to use the method to study tissue samples from COVID-19 patients in the hope that it will provide information on where and how the new coronavirus attacks different organs.

In a new study researchers at Karolinska Institutet and KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of brain atlas based on an innovative method of mapping brain tissue into areas according to their molecular profile. The study is published in Science Advances.

Researchers at Aging Research Center, KI, and collaborators in Italy and Spain, studied how multimorbidity, the occurrence of multiple chronic diseases in the same individual, changed over time in old individuals during a 12-year period using data from the Swedish National study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K). The study is published today in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Common respiratory bacteria carried in the nose by healthy children, can sometimes cause life-threatening infections. Birgitta Henriques Normark, Professor at the Department of Microbiology, Tumour and Cell Biology, is investigating why this occurs. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has now awarded her the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorial Chair in Medicine – a SEK 10 million grant over a period of five years.

The European Commission recognizes Karolinska Institutet with the HR Excellence in Research Award. This is a clear indication that KI is on the right track when it comes to implementing the European Charter for researchers and the Code of conduct for the recruitment of researchers.

Knowledge of how human fat tissue is affected by age has long been defined by numerous mouse-based studies. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have now, for the first time, been able to conduct a prospective study on humans that provides novel insights into how our fat cells reduce lipid metabolism with age. The study is published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

In a new study, researchers from the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet have shown a clear link between game intelligence and the brain's ability to create and adapt under time pressure. The study is published in Nature Publishing Group's journal Scientific Reports.

Thanks to new technology, researchers at the Clinical Physiology group, Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, Karolinska Institutet, have been able to show that females have higher myocardial perfusion, blood volume and extracellular volume in the heart compared to males. These findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

In a collaborative project between Karolinska institutet, Karolinska university hospital, Uppsala university and Turku university led by professor Agneta Nordberg, KI, has differences in pathological changes been studied using PET tracers in brain tissue from different genetic variants of hereditary Alzheimer's disease compared with sporadic Alzheimer's disease.

Johan Rehnberg at ARC is awarded FORTE grants totalling SEK 2.4 million for a postdoc position in the Netherlands to conduct research on "Improving public health in the elderly population: is there a contradiction between efficiency and inequality?".

Migrants from Africa and the Middle East and their children are more likely to be placed under compulsory care than the Swedish-born population when admitted to hospital for psychosis for the first time. That is according to a large, nationwide study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and University College London in the U.K., published in the journal Psychological Medicine.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet discovered that the retinoblastoma associated protein RB and the mitochondrial ribosomal protein S18-2 (MRPS18-2) play the essential roles in homeostasis of cell stemness. Rb1-/- mouse primary cells expressing both, S18-2 and RB exhibited a stem cell phenotype. Downregulation of S18-2 and RB in human mesenchymal stem cells resulted in decreased expression of stem cell-related genes. Loss of the S18-2 protein resulted in embryonic lethality in zebrafish.

The risk of developing more than one skin melanoma over a ten-year period has seen a ten-fold increase in Sweden since the 1960s, a new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Lund University published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute reports. The researchers suspect that the increase is due to a change in holiday customs with more active sunbathing and overseas trips to southern climes.

Cell surface receptors are essential for the communication of human cells. Simon Elsässer’s lab has developed a method to study these proteins on living cells. With very subtle alterations the method allows to label receptors with two different fluorescent probes in defined positions, as the authors show in Cell Reports. This can give detailed insights in how the conformation of a receptor changes as a result of for example drug binding, in the natural setting of the cell membrane.

Decades-long endurance training alters the activity of genes in human skeletal muscle that are important for metabolic health. This is according to a new study published in the journal Cell Reports by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of San Diego in the U.S. Sex differences found in untrained individuals were also dramatically reduced with long-term training. The results may have implications for metabolic disease prevention.

The StratNeuro board has reviewed the neuroscience submissions to the SLL call “högre kliniska forskare” (2019 and 2020) and decided to support the following researchers with SEK 500,000 each.

StratNeuro has awarded SEK 1,000,000 in start-up grant to each of the following KI recipients of a 2019 VR ‘starting grant’.

StratNeuro received 37 submissions from across 9 departments for the 2020 postdoctoral research grants. After evaluation from 10 external invited reviewers, we are happy to announce that StratNeuro will fund the 15 top ranked submissions (shown below in alphabetical order).

In a study in mice, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered a new potential therapeutic approach to facilitate neurological recovery in people with diabetes suffering from stroke. The treatment strategy is based on the chronic normalization of hyperglycemia after stroke. The scientists hope that these new results, presented in the scientific journal Diabetes, open the possibility to improve the current rehabilitative strategies against stroke in the diabetic population.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the efficacy and safety of different approaches to ovarian stimulation of women with breast cancer in a multicenter study. Results of this large prospective multicenter study support the premise that current approaches to fertility preservation with ovarian stimulation in women with breast cancer are both safe and efficacious.

Patients with low income have a higher risk of death following surgery for lung cancer compared with patients with high income. The association remains even after taking prevalence of common comorbidities, and other factors that are known to influence the risk of death, into account. This is according to a study published in the journal Thorax by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

We can now conclude that the COVID-19 related morbidity among children during the two most intense months of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Stockholm was low, despite the strategy to keep preschools and primary schools open.

Professor Janne Johansson has been appointed Head of the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition, starting on September 1st, 2020 until August 31st, 2025.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet have discovered a new interaction between two proteins that reduce the risk of DNA damage and cellular cancer development. The findings on the proteins RTEL1 and Poldip3 are published in the journal Genes & Development.

Anders Jahre´s Award to younger researchers goes to Niklas Björkström, Center for Infectious Medicine, for his discoveries in how NK cells develop and function in physiological and pathological situations.

Karolinska Institutet has been awarded funding from the Swedish Insitute for two training programmes amounting to a total of four million SEK within the framework of the Swedish Institute’s Public Sector Innovation Programme. The programmes will run 2020-2021.

While most countries have national policies in place, effective coverage is very low and often exclude those who have the greatest need. There are often several prominent barriers, especially for those outside the formal workforce who are affected by illnesses such as COVID-19, according to a newly published article by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and the SPARKS Network.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have found that the claustrum is organised into functional connectivity modules rather than a hub-like structure, which up until now, was the prevailing idea. The study was recently published in Current Biology.

Congratulations to Andrea Carmine Belin and Caroline Ran, researchers at the Department of Neuroscience, who have received The Swedish Brain Foundation's Research Grant in 2020, for their project on cluster headache, a neurovascular disease leading to extreme pain and for which there is currently no cure.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered that excessive degradation of the power plants of our cells plays an important role in the onset of mitochondrial disease in children. These inherited metabolic disorders can have severe consequences such as brain dysfunction and neurological impairment. The study is published in EMBO Molecular Medicine.

A drug against rheumatoid arthritis called baricitinib could potentially be repurposed to treat patients with COVID-19, according to a study conducted by an international research team including researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. The findings, published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, represent an example of how artificial intelligence (AI)-algorithms could help identify existing drugs as potential therapies against as new illnesses.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet uncover surprising features of mitochondrial protein synthesis. The study, published in Nature Communications, sheds light on the fundamental mechanisms used by the cell’s power plant.

Good health policies have the potential to positively impact people’s lives and reduce inequalities. Even though the aim is to base health policies on science, research evidence is only one of many factors impacting their development and implementation. Politics, culture, money and available health care staff often shape health policies and how they are put into practice.

The capacity of a stem cell population to generate several distinct cell types in a temporally defined manner is fundamental to both organ development and homeostasis. To achieve this, stem cells must carefully balance self-renewal and commitment to cellular differentiation, but how this is regulated at the genetic level has remained unclear.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet are part of a consortium granted almost 66 million euros (690 million Swedish kronor) by the european Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and other parties. The funds will be used to develop, test and facilitate access to chemical substances and other research tools that could pave the way for new drug targets and treatments of diseases within areas such as inflammation and cancer.

The School of Health Innovation is the first and only Nordic initiative to offer courses in innovation as an extension of the academic subjects health sciences and life sciences. The school was founded by Karolinska Institutet, KI, Oslo University, UiO, and Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU. The University of Copenhagen will be joining the initiative shortly and the Novo Nordisk Foundation announces its financial support with over SEK 10 million over the next three years.

Anders Jahre's Awards for Medical Research to Jiri Bartek and Anders Jahre Award for young researchers to Niklas Björkström. The prize is awarded by University of Oslo.

KI researcher Tobias Alfvén has been elected new chairman of the Swedish Society of Medicine and will take office on 1 July, 2020.

A new EU funded research project entitled “nexT gEneRation sMart INterconnectEd ioT (TERMINET)” has been initiated by researchers at KI and the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at LIME. Karolinska Institutet is participating as healthcare research partner, within a consortium of 27 partners all around Europe.

In a sense, Göran Stiernstedt will have come full circle when he takes up office as KI chairperson on 1 May 2020. He once took his medical degree at KI, and now he’s back.

During a digital ceremony last Thursday, May 28, 19 international students in Sweden received the Global Swede award. One of them is KI Health Informatics student Winner Ng!

In a population-based cohort study from Sweden and Denmark of patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) during 1969-2017 and matched reference individuals from the general population, Ola Olén, Jonas F Ludvigsson and colleagues found that IBD patients had an increased risk of small bowel cancer.

Researchers at the Medical Management Centre (MMC), Karolinska Institutet, have been granted funding for the research project "The quandary of low value care: health professionals’ decision-making on abandoning ineffective practices". We asked project leader Henna Hasson to tell us a little more about the project.

Alexander Fyrdahl from the group Clinical Physiology, the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, will defend his thesis "Applications of the golden angle in cardiovascular MRI" on June 5th, 2020. Main Supervisor is Andreas Sigfridsson.

The anaesthetic drug ketamine has been shown, in low doses, to have a rapid effect on difficult-to-treat depression. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet now report that they have identified a key target for the drug: specific serotonin receptors in the brain. Their findings, which are published in Translational Psychiatry, give hope of new, effective antidepressants.