News archive

Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam and Ganesh Phad publish in the Journal of Experimental Medicine

An international research team led from Karolinska Institutet have identified two genes that may be linked to an increased disposition to engage in repeated acts of violence. The findings are being published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, and are based on genetic analysis of people convicted of various crimes.

Enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) bacteria are a major cause of diarrhoea in children below five years of age in low and middle-income countries and also in travellers.

Public authorities and organisations in Sweden are mobilising their resources in an effort to halt the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Karolinska Institutet arranged a meeting to discuss existing challenges in terms of organising aid initiatives and there is a course starting on Monday that will prepare medical staff for their work in the countries most severely hit by Ebola.

How are children made – at molecular level? That is a question Luca Jovine is trying to answer in his research. In the long term, knowledge about the mechanisms of fertilisation can lead both to new contraceptives and to new hope for the childless.

The salamander is a master at recreating parts of the body, both lost limbs as well as parts of the heart and brain. András Simon wants to understand how it works. This knowledge could lead to new treatments for everything from wound healing to Parkinson's.

Olle Kämpe is professor of clinical endocrinology and is researching autoimmunity. By studying specific diseases such as Addison's disease and APS-1, he wants to increase a broader understanding of how and why the body's immune system attacks its own tissues. His research has resulted in new diagnostic methods, and may eventually lead to new treatments.

Per-Johan Jakobsson, professor of translational inflammatory research, wants to gain a better understanding of chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatism with the aid of proteomics, the large-scale analysis of proteins. His research on prostaglandins may lead to more efficacious drugs for pain and fever in the long term.

Vivianne Malmström, professor of rheumatological immunology, is doing research to enable autoimmune diseases like rheumatism to be cured and prevented in the future. To achieve this, more knowledge is needed about the diseases' mechanisms at the molecular level.

On the 25 September 2014, Forte's board approved this years applications for research projects, junior research grants and postdocs.

Physical exercise has many beneficial effects on human health, including the protection from stress-induced depression. However, until now the mechanisms that mediate this protective effect have been unknown.

An internal contest has been ongoing between a little band of researchers at Karolinska Institutet. And the one who succeeds in quoting Bob Dylan in most scientific articles before going into retirement is the winner.

[Edit: Bengt Samuelsson passed away on July 5, 2024. This article was written in 2014.] Karolinska Institutet’s former Vice-Chancellor, the Nobel Prize Laureate Bengt Samuelsson, reached the age of 80 in 2014. At the end of August that year, researchers from around the world, met up to honour him as founder of the research field Lipid Mediators with a three-day symposium.

Karolinska Institutet’s online courses will be available for everybody on the shared platform edX.org which is a non-profit platform that was founded by the two leading universities Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The sensitivity of fat cells to signals that increase the breakdown of fat is linked to the receptor ALK7, according to a study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet. The discovery, which is published in the new scientific journal eLife, suggests that ALK7 might be an interesting target for future strategies to treat obesity.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet provides insight on how the brain processes external input such as touch, vision or sound from different sources and sides of the body, in order to select and generate adequate movements. The findings, which are presented in the journal Neuron, show that the striatum acts as a sensory ‘hub’ integrating various types of sensory information, with specialised functional roles for the different neuron types.