News archive

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.

Proteins can make any inventor green with envy. It is proteins that make the body work. But when these same super-substances make mistakes, we may get sick with things like cancer or Alzheimer's disease. The job of researchers is to sort out the proteins when they malfunction.

The core facilities at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics and the SciLifeLab infrastructure contribute to the REMEDi4ALL project that kicks off with the ambition of establishing a European research and innovation eco-system facilitating fast and cost-effective patient-centric development and access to repurposed medicines.

Analysing molecular characteristics and their variation during lifestyle changes, by combining digital tools, classical laboratory tests and new biomolecular measurements, could enable individualised prevention of disease. This is according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the University of Helsinki in Finland published in the journal Cell Systems. The researchers show what a proactive healthcare model could comprise and how it could help in maintaining good health.

Analysing all the proteins that exist in a tissue type (the so-called proteome) can provide vital information on the causes of diseases and how they can best be treated. We talk to Janne Lehtiö, professor at the Department of Oncology-Pathology, about proteome-based medicine and what it can contribute to personalised cancer therapy.

The gold complex auranofin has traditionally been used for treating rheumatism but is also being evaluated as a treatment for certain forms of cancer. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden now show that other molecules that inhibit the same biological system have a more specific effect than auranofin and therefore may have greater potential as cancer therapies. The results have been published in the journal Redox Biology.

For a cell to grow and divide, it needs to produce new proteins. This also applies to cancer cells. In a new study published in Science Advances, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the protein eIF4A3 and its role in the growth of cancer cells. The study shows that by blocking or reducing the production of this protein, other processes arise that cause the growth and cell division of cancer cells to cease and eventually die.

Despite the importance of enzyme-substrate reactions in biology and medicine, there is a lack of general and unbiased tools for identifying substrate proteins for a given enzyme of interest. Scientists from Karolinska Institutet have now developed a new proteomics method called “System-wide Identification and prioritization of Enzyme Substrates by Thermal Analysis” (SIESTA). Their study is published in Nature Communications.

The Human Protein Atlas, a Swedish initiative, is turning 20. To celebrate the anniversary, the HPA consortium is launching a new website that combines atlas facts with breathtaking films of the human body and an updated version of the protein database. Researchers from Karolinska Institutet are involved in many different ways in the project.

A new paper shows that differences in plasma protein biomarker levels are controlled by hundreds of genetic variants across the human genome, and that these insights can be used to predict which drug targets that are likely to be effective future medicines. The study has been published in the October issue of Nature Metabolism.

An international team of scientists led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet has launched a comprehensive overview of all proteins expressed in the brain, published in the journal Science. The open-access database offers medical researchers an unprecedented resource to deepen their understanding of neurobiology and develop new, more effective therapies and diagnostics targeting psychiatric and neurological diseases.

Using a trick involving detergent and mass spectrometry, a research group has been able to wash and weigh protein molecules to determine which lipids make the protein work. The findings may help design molecules that stick to individual membrane proteins and pave the way for the development of new drugs including antibiotics and cancer therapies. The study is published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Researchers at SciLifeLab report in the journal Science that they have created a detailed blood atlas of the proteins in human immune cells. The open-access database offers medical researchers an unprecedented resource in the search for treatments for diseases.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have developed a new method for identifying which proteins are affected by specific drugs. The tool and the results it has already generated have been made freely available online. The method is described in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

In a new study, led by Professor Janne Lehtiö (SciLifeLab/Karolinska Institutet), researchers from SciLifeLab, University of Oslo, and MD Anderson Cancer Center have generated a detailed map of protein levels in breast tumors. The proteome complements the previously known DNA and RNA picture of breast cancer and sheds light on how different mutations give rise to changes on the protein level.

Professor Janne Lehtiö and coworkers at the department of Oncology-Pathology have published an article in Nature Communications describing their new Integrated Proteogenomics Analysis Workflow (IPAW). The method enables a more reliable identification of novel peptides.

In a recent publication in Molecular Human Reproduction, researchers at OnkPat could identify the specific proteome profiling of mouse ovarian follicles at three different developmental stages. To do that, the researchers isolated the follicles and cultured them in vitro. This is the first protein mapping of ovarian follicles ever published.