Rickard Sandberg awarded the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship in Medicine

“It is an amazing honour, partly because the recipient is selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,” he says in a press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. “The professorship allows us to invest in more systematic and substantial projects, and we can explore innovative projects that take more time.”

Rickard Sandberg is professor of molecular genetics at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Karolinska Institutet, where he leads a research group that focuses on the processes that regulate the human genome. This is done at a level of detail that was impossible just a few years ago.

“We used to have to look at many cells clumped together, but these methods, developed by us and others, mean that we can start to study the level of expression of genes in individual cells,” he says. “We can use this to learn more about what actually happens when genes are activated.”

High-level basic research

In total, there are 20,000 protein-coded genes in our DNA. Rickard Sandberg and his colleagues hope to answer how many different patterns there are for turning these genes on and off, and how often this happens. They are now planning to investigate a large number of cell types in humans and mice, mapping their gene activation process for the very first time.

This is basic research at a very high level, but the results may also be of practical benefit. Another line of their research is to see what happens in the cells and to their genes when, for example, a certain drug is taken – knowledge that could one day be used by pharmaceutical companies in the development of new medicines.