News archive

Tinnitus is the experience of annoying sounds that no one else can hear, a kind of phantom sound. The problem is increasing, probably due to exposure to high noise levels.

Karolinska Institutet’s Centre for Health Crises is to receive SEK 15 million grant from Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. The money will be used to build up the centre and develop its activities over the coming two years.

On the occasion of World Kidney Day, HRH Prince Daniel invited seven Swedish kidney and transplant researchers for a discussion at the Royal Palace.

A team led by Karolinska Institutet has combined Artificial Intelligence (AI) with structural biology to gain insights into two similar proteins that prevent bacterial infection in the urinary tract and the gastrointestinal system. Their results are published in "Nature Structural & Molecular Biology".

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered the preclinical stage in progressive cognitive decline leading to the clinical stage of dementia. A study published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, reports that over one fourth of rural-dwelling older adults in China are affected by MCI.

Sexual and gender-based harassment in the workplace can contribute to the development of mental ill-health requiring treatment with antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication, a study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in the journal Occupational and Environmental Medicine reports.

Several researchers at KI have offered to host Ukrainian colleagues. Initiatives have been launched through, among others, the organisation EMBO, which supports research and researchers in the field of life science.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive and complex disorder that affects multiple parts of the brain but also other organ systems. Symptoms start gradually, sometimes with a barely noticeable tremor in just one hand. Tremor is common, and the disorder also commonly causes stiffness and slowing of movements. More than 10 million people worldwide are living with PD and the incidence increases dramatically with age.

Hi Irene Brusini, PhD student at the Division of Clinical Geriatrics, NVS. On March 25 you will defend your thesis ”Methods for the analysis and characterization of brain morphology from MRI images”, what's the main focus of the thesis?

She will take up the post at the association's annual conference in September 2022.

Women who have had one ovary surgically removed (unilateral oophorectomy) are less likely to become pregnant after in vitro fertilisation and give birth to fewer babies than women with both ovaries. That is according to an extensive meta-analysis published in the journal Fertility and Sterility by researchers at Karolinska Institutet.

Global warming is likely to increase the number of people requiring hospitalization due to critically low sodium levels in the blood, a condition known as hyponatremia. A new study from Karolinska Institutet projects that a temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius would increase the burden on hospitals from hyponatremia by almost 14 percent. The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have studied long-term morbidity and mortality in individuals who have had different models of biological heart valves implanted. The results, which show that there are considerable differences in performance depending on model group, are published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital have strengthened collaboration within precision medicine by establishing the Precision Medicine Centre Karolinska (PMCK) and have now entered into a unique cooperation agreement.

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.

While the large proportion of our genome that does not instruct our cells to form proteins has been harder to study than protein-coding genes, it has been shown to have vital physiological functions. Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have now developed new high-precision tools able to identify what these noncoding sequences do. The study, which is published in the journal Nature Genetics, may eventually contribute to the development of new, targeted drugs.

The February sun was glittering in the glazed facades when Karolinska Institutet welcomed Minister for Education Anna Ekström on Monday 28 February. Meanwhile, the situation grew gloomier in Ukraine, which was demonstrated by, amongst other things, a lecture in disaster medicine.

Fatigue, or severe tiredness and exhaustion, is a distressing condition for many patients with advanced cancer. Unfortunately, good pharmacological treatment options are limited, and the ones available come with a risk of side effects and/or habituation.

His excellency the Ambassador of Japan to Sweden, Masaki Noke, visited KI on 24th November, 2022, to explore the institution and world leading research ongoing at KI.

The Department of Global Public Health (GPH) has got two new doctoral student representatives; Soha el Halabi and Katrine de Angeles. They represent the students in meetings and committees at the department and work to help and support new and existing doctoral students.

The Selivanova's group at MTC recently established a multidisciplinary collaboration together with Dr. Marie-Stéphanie Aschtgen, microbiologist in the Henriques-Normark groups (also at MTC) to study the interplay between bacteria and cancer, focusing on how specific bacterial systems influence host tumor supressors. Together they recently got their first collaborative paper accepted in Oncogene, entitled "Enterobacteria impair host p53 tumor suppressor activity through mRNA destabilization".

Last week Reza Rasti obtained his doctoral degree after successfully defending his thesis titled ‘Point-of-care diagnostics of childhood central nervous system infections, with a focus on usability in low-resource settings'. The defence took place in lecture hall David in the Widerströmska building and joining via zoom from Uganda was his opponent Philippa Musoke, Professor at Makerere University.

On the 3rd of March, doctoral student Vanda had her half-time seminar online via Zoom and in Widerströmska huset. Vanda is a Mozambican healthcare practitioner specialising as a pediatric surgeon in Spain and is now using her experiences from clinical work into research in her thesis titled:
‘Acute pediatric injury in a low-resource African setting during the COVID-19 pandemic: Insight on injury epidemiology and care from the largest hospitals of Mozambique’

Nikolaos Christidis term commences in June 2022 and he will serve as President of the group during 2023-2024.

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.

Preprint servers are a mixed bag of important research papers and articles of more dubious quality. The Preprint Club sifts out the nuggets that are worthy of our attention – and has now been joined by scientists from Karolinska Institutet.

The Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund has decided to grant SEK 150 million in grants to Swedish childhood cancer research, of which SEK 60 million to a total of 32 researchers at Karolinska Institutet.

COMMENTARY Last night’s military aggression against Ukraine must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, comments the KI president Ole Petter Ottersen on the military aggression against Ukraine.

Johan von Schreeb, professor of global disaster medicine and director of the Centre for Research on Health Care in Disasters at Karolinska Institutet, has been named director of KI’s newly established Centre for Health Crises. The aim is to create a center based on KI’s knowledge and capability, that finds connections between groups and people, with the aim of increasing preparedness for a new pandemic or health crisis.

The EU has granted Karolinska Institutet support for several new projects under the Horizon Europe programme, the Union's most important funding programme for research and innovation. The largest of them is PARC, which will contribute to the safer management of chemicals and improve the dialogue between researchers and authorities.

Threats or violence in the workplace is never acceptable. Hatred, threats and harassment against researchers, but also against other occupational groups, is unfortunately not a new phenomenon but has lately also increased, especially among employees working with research related to COVID-19. This is of course a very unfortunate development and KI wants to raise awareness of the support that is available to you as an employee.

In a new study conducted by researchers at the group Vascular Surgery, Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, osteomodulin was identified as a novel biomarker for vascular calcification. The results of the study was recently published in the journal Clinical and Translational Medicine.

When she was 14 years old Jessica Strid was treated for cancer and was told that it would be difficult for her to get pregnant. Today she has two children. ”I am very grateful”, she says.

Many young people whose fertility have been impaired due to cancer treatment can today be helped to become parents. Kenny Rodriguez-Wallberg, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Oncology and Pathology at Karolinska Institutet and Senior Consultant at Karolinska University Hospital, answers six common questions.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows how certain RNA molecules control the repair of damaged DNA in cancer cells, a discovery that could eventually give rise to better cancer treatments. The study is published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The EU-funded research network Vaccelerate has now opened a European volunteer-registry of study participants for research on COVID-19 vaccines. The aim of this initiative is to boost the capacity for clinical studies on COVID-19 vaccines in the EU, but also to support vaccine research in future pandemics.

Depression is a common and serious mental health condition. It causes a wide variety of symptoms, such as feeling hopeless and sad, and losing interest or pleasure in hobbies and activities. To be diagnosed with depression, symptoms must last for at least two consecutive weeks. At its worst, this mental condition can lead to suicide. It is a worldwide psychiatric illness with a wide range of ages of onset, and it occurs about twice as often in women than men.

The major genetic risk variant for severe COVID-19, one we inherited from Neandertals, is associated with a 27 percent lower risk of HIV infection. This is according to a new study from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany published in the journal PNAS.

Little has been known to date about how the immune system’s natural killer (NK) cells detect which cells have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. An international team of scientist led by researchers from Karolinska Institutet now shows that NK cells respond to a certain peptide on the surface of infected cells. The study, which is published in Cell Reports, is an important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of how the immune system reacts to COVID-19.

KI researcher Lu Yi has been awarded 1.5 million euros from the prestigious European Research Council Starting Grants. The funds will go toward research on different subtypes of depression with the goal of finding treatments that work for more people.

The Thoracic Surgery research group at the Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery at Karolinska Institutet receives a 15 million SEK donation from the Schörling Foundation. The purpose of the donation is to enforce the development of cardiothoracic surgical technology and methodology and the related research by the group.

You are the same person inside, although your body is ageing and your memory failing. Professor Maria Eriksdotter hopes to add to our knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease. But she also wants to fight ageism. “The status of the elderly needs to be raised,” she says.

Spider silk is Nature’s high-performance fiber as it combines high tensile strength and large extensibility. A research group at Karolinska Institutet has developed a new and scalable method for producing spider silk proteins and are aiming to scale up the spinning process. Sustainable alternatives to petroleum-based products are needed since the environmental pollution caused by the exploitation of these limited resources is significant.

Every day, people are exposed to large number of pollutants, but the problem of how to assess the dangers of the chemical “cocktail effect” has long frustrated both scientists and public authorities. A collaborative study involving researchers from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Science now presents a new strategy that combines population studies with experiments using cell and animal models.

Karolinska Institutet (KI) president Ole Petter Ottersen’s term of office expires on 28 February 2023. The KI University Board (Konsistoriet) has therefore decided to begin an open recruitment process to propose a president and appoint a vice-president to take up office on 1 March 2023.

The Best Practice Guidance regarding improved use of technology in dementia care was developed a few years ago, including researchers from the CACTUS research group. In December, an updated version of the Best Practice Guidance was published.

Sweden is one of the few countries that have removed the dental health recommendation to give prophylactic antibiotics to people at a higher risk of infection of the heart valves, so-called infective endocarditis. Since the recommendation was removed in 2012, there has been no increase in this disease, a registry study from Karolinska Institutet published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases shows.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet have analysed blood and sperm samples from healthy parents to children with genetic syndromes and the results indicate that germline mosaicism is underestimated as a cause to syndromes and that the level of the genetic variant is higher in sperm than in blood.  The study was recently published in Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine.

Erik Vismer and his wife sought help from an IVF clinic to get children. What they didn’t expect was the effort and time that the process demanded from them. Read an in-depth article series from KI’s Swedish popular science magazine.

According to the WHO, almost 50 million couples worldwide are involuntarily childless while demand for assisted fertilisation is expected to grow as treatments have become both more effective and more widely accessible. Read the first article from a in-depth series about infertility from KI’s Swedish popular science magazine.