News archive

New technologies open new possibilities for groundbreaking research. StratNeuro aims to support the development and dissemination of new technologies and therefore announces a new funding call.

Cluster headache, one of the most painful diseases known to man, is genetically correlated with risk-taking behaviour, ADHD, depression and musculoskeletal pain, and smoking is a causal risk factor, according to an article published in Annals of Neurology.

Professor Mats Trulsson at the Department of Dental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, has been awarded an honorary doctorate at Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier, in Toulouse, France.

Patients with cluster headache suffer from various sleep problems, such as insomnia, which also occur in periods when the patient is symptom-free and should be considered during treatment. This is shown by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in a study recently published in The Journal of Headache and Pain.

StratNeuro awards a total of 15 MSEK to support Collaborative Neuroscience Projects.

Each year, the Swedish Brain Foundation supports qualified research on the brain and other nervous systems, as well as diseases, injuries, and disabilities throughout the nervous system. Andrea Carmine Belin runs one of the 44 research projects at Karolinska Institutet that have been awarded this year's research grant from the Swedish Brain Foundation.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have identified a group of nerve cells in the mouse brain that are involved in creating negative emotional states and chronic stress. The neurons, which have been mapped with a combination of advanced techniques, also have receptors for oestrogen, which could explain why women as a group are more sensitive to stress than men. The study is published in Nature Neuroscience.

Federico Iovino and his lab members have been awarded with a grant from the ItsME Foundation to enable their research on the prevention of neuronal damage caused by bacterial infections. The ItsME Foundation was founded in 2019 by Jur Deitmers and has its base in The Netherlands, with the goal to fight Meningitis and Encephalitis.

The Encephalitis Society is a worldwide international charity with the mission of building better futures by driving research, accelerating awareness, and saving lives. In the latest issue of their newsletter which has been running since 2003, the society has chosen to highlight the research performed in Federico Iovino's group.

Creative ideas were born when the NeurotechEU alliance arranged a hackathon at Karolinska Institutet. “Activities like this highlight the value of having people from other disciplines and countries – and at different stages of their careers – engage in cross-border innovative processes with each other,” says KI president Annika Östman Wernerson.

As part of the Doctoral Programme in Neuroscience a course entitled The Interplay between neuro-infections and neurodegenerative diseases (course 5677 in KIWAS) will be offered this coming fall. All doctoral students working on neuro-infections, neuroinflammation, neurological disorders and neurodegenerative diseases are particularly encourage to apply.

The European University of Brain and Technology, NeurotechEU, of which Karolinska Institutet is one of nine partners, is pleased to announce the availability of ten competitive funds for short-term travel for faculty, staff, postdoctoral fellows, students and/or trainees between the partner institutions to plan or conduct collaborative projects.

Between 13 and 19 March 2023, neuroscientists around the world took the initiative to spread the word about the importance of brain science as part of the "Brain Awareness Week". The Strategic Neuroscience Research Network (StratNeuro) at Karolinska Institutet took the opportunity to initiate a recurring outreach event to spark enthusiasm and raise awareness for neuroscience research, which was also part of the global campaign.

The European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Rising Star Award honours two Early Career Scientists annually, whose research in applied and translational neuroscience has the potential to advance the science, treatment and prevention of brain disorders.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have mapped how cells in the human spinal cord are formed in the embryo and what genes control the process. Their findings can give rise to new knowledge on how injury to and diseases of the spinal cord arise and how they can be treated. The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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.

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.

In a study entitled "Bacterial Meningitis in Africa", recently published in Frontiers in Neurology as part of the Research Topic "Neuroimmunology in Africa", researchers raise awareness of strides and recommendations in the diagnosis, management and prevention of bacterial meningitis.

StratNeuro announces grants for Collaborative Neuroscience Research Projects.

The StratNeuro Visiting Scholars funding aims to attract outstanding scholars from non-Swedish universities for short-term visits (1-6 months long). This call aims to support new international collaborations and scientific exchange within the Karolinska Institutet Neuroscience community. We encourage applications for Visiting Scholars from our NeurotechEU partner universities. For the Visiting Scholar this is an opportunity to engage with neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have been looking at how movement shapes our senses and how sensory and motor processes are both affected in Parkinson’s disease. In a study published in Nature Communications, de la Torre-Martinez et al, show that movement reduces the responses to sensory input and that both sensory and motor processes are altered in an animal model of Parkinson’s disease.

The StratNeuro Bridging Grant at the consolidator level is a funding initiative where StratNeuro awards outstanding researchers in the field of neuroscience at Karolinsk Institutet, who have not been awarded the KI consolidator grant or equivalent, giving them the opportunity to consolidate their research.

Researchers at Karolinska have uncovered how brain circuits encode the start, duration and sudden change of speed of locomotion. The study is published in Neuron.

The StratNeuro Bridging Grant at the consolidator level is a funding initiative where StratNeuro awards up to two consolidator level grants to support outstanding researchers in the field of neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have found that the perception of one's own body is largely based on the brain making guesses based on probability theory. The results are shown in a study recently published in the journal eLife.

Four research projects coordinated from Karolinska Institutet have been awarded project grants by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW) in 2022. This means that, over SEK 135 million are allocated to KI research in the fields of immunology, neuroscience, and stem cell biology.

StratNeuro has awarded SEK 2,000,000 in start-up grants to 4 international researchers who are establishing their groups at Karolinska Institutet, after receiving faculty-funded Assistant Professor (“biträdande lekor”) positions.

Karolinska Institutet has signed a collaboration agreement with the European research infrastructure EBRAINS, which offers digital tools and services for research into the brain. The purpose of this agreement is to give KI's researchers access to new digital technology and state-of-the-art resources, as well as the opportunity to contribute to the further development of the area of neuroscience within the EU.

People with long-term neuropathic pain took significantly fewer sick days from work after treatment with spinal cord stimulation, according to a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet published in the journal PAIN. The findings suggest that the treatment has the potential to increase life quality for chronic pain patients and reduce costs to society, the researchers say.

Bacterial meningitis is a life-threatening infectious disease of the brain that leaves many survivors with long-lasting neurological impairments. Now, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden show in a study on rats that the brain’s tool for waste clearance, the glymphatic system, malfunctions during bacterial meningitis, causing a buildup of toxic garbage that damages brain cells. The findings are published in the journal mBio.

For a drug to be effective and not harmful it needs to be administered at the right dosage. Certain enzymes in the body eliminate drugs, and the activity of these enzymes vary between individuals. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied two enzymatic variants which eliminate drugs less efficiently and show that the these enzyme variants are inherited from Neandertals.

On 18-20 May 18 2022 we were excited to finally host the annual StratNeuro retreat at Runö in Åkersberga. This year's retreat was somewhat special. Many were eager to meet again, and the organisers worked hard to make this meeting a productive and memorable one.

StratNeuro aims to fund junior researchers to strengthen groundbreaking research in the field of neuroscience. In the 2022 call for StratNeuro postdoctoral funding, we received 30 proposal from 9 KI departments.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden might have found an explanation for why people with self-injury behaviour generally feel less pain than others. The key seems to be a more effective pain-modulation system, a discovery that can benefit people seeking help for their self-harm. The findings are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

The repurposing of FDA-approved drugs for alternative diseases is a faster way of bringing new treatments into the clinic. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have repurposed a cancer drug for treatment of neuroinflammatory diseases such as multiple sclerosis. A novel drug carrier was also developed to facilitate drug delivery to target myeloid cells. These pre-clinical findings are described in a paper in the journal EMBO Reports.

A new study from the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet characterises a novel neuronal population in the basal ganglia, responsible for the interaction between two types of neurotransmitters, GABA and acetylcholine. The study was recently published in Cell Reports.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have studied how the screen habits of US children correlate with how their cognitive abilities develop over time. They found that the children who spent an above-average time playing video games increased their intelligence more than the average, while TV watching or social media had neither a positive nor a negative effect. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Stategic Research Area Neuroscience, StratNeuro, announces up to ten grants to support postdoctoral researchers at Karolinska Institutet. This StratNeuro funding aims to support outstanding postdoctoral researchers in basic and clinical neuroscience.

StratNeuro has awarded SEK 1,000,000 in start-up grant 2022 to Enric Llorens, Arvid Guterstam and Jeroen Goos.

Researchers behind the science of how we move have been recognized with the The Brain Prize 2022. Ole Kiehn, from the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, is one of three neuroscientists receiving the world's largest prize for brain research, awarded on a yearly basis by the Lundbeck Foundation.

Caroline Ran, researcher at the Department of Neurosicence, has been awarded the Harold Wolff-John Graham Award in recognition of her outstanding achievements in headache research. The award, sponsored by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN), amounts to 1000 USD, plus 200 USD in subsistence allowance to speak at AAN's annual meeting in April 2022.

Thanks to a groundbreaking study, leading migraine scientists can better understand the biological basis of migraine and its subtypes and could speed up the search for new treatment of the condition, which affects over a billion individuals wordwide. The new findings, published in the journal Nature Genetics, uncovered more of the genetic architecture of migraine subtypes than was previously known.

The StratNeuro board has reviewed the neuroscience submissions to the SLL call “Kliniska Forskare” (2020) and decided to support Mikael Tiger with SEK 500,000, for his project entitled "Optimized treatment for depression: mechanisms of action and response markers and antidepressive effect versus side effects".

The bridging grant is a funding initiative where StratNeuro, and other strategic research areas (SFOs) at KI, award funding to promising researchers with outstanding scientific merits, giving them the opportunity to consolidate their research.

Understanding how the complex geometry of branching tissues take shape during embryonic development or the growth of any organisms has long been a fascinating subject. Neuroscientists at Karolinska Institutet, together with theoretical physicists from IST-Austria, have now combined live imaging in a zebrafish model system with analytical theory to uncover a generic design principle to predict 3D axon branching morphogenesis.

Her research focuses on hereditary brain diseases and, among other things, cluster headache, an extremely painful disease which comes in attacks. It is not known what causes the disease, and so far, there are no effective treatments.

Federico Iovino, Assistant Professor and group leader at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, has been recognised "World Expert" in the field "Streptococcus pneumoniae” by Expertscape, a website that objectively ranks physicans, researchers and institutions by their expertise in more than 29,000 biomedical topics.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is about how people can feel temperature and touch. The discoveries explain basic functions in our lives and have opened doors to new treatments for pain, for example. We take it for granted, the fact that we can feel an icy wind, a hot plate or a hug, but how this actually works was unknown until it was discovered by the Nobel Laureates, a discovery made not so long ago.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have participated in a large international research project that has identified all cell types in the motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement. The research has resulted in a detailed cell atlas presented in a large special package of scientific articles in Nature today. The long-term goal of the collaboration is to create a cell atlas of the whole brain in order to increase knowledge of brain diseases and contribute to better treatments.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 has been awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian “for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch.”