Seeking new treatments for immunodeficiency diseases
Many immunodeficiency diseases are serious conditions that require stem cell transplantation. Lisa Westerberg is studying how mutations prevent immune cells from moving properly in order to find new therapeutic strategies. Meet one of the new professors of Karolinska Institutet who will participate in this year's installation ceremony at Aula Medica on 3 October.
Text: Karin Tideström, for KI’s installation ceremony booklet 2024
What are you researching?
“I’m researching immunodeficiency diseases, which are congenital disorders of the immune system. The children and adults affected have trouble fighting common infections and a tendency to develop autoimmunity and blood cancers like lymphoma and leukaemia. Immune cells constantly move in and out of tissue to detect bacteria, viruses and other pathogens. In the diseases I study, mutations of the cytoskeleton prevent the immune cells from migrating as they should between blood and tissue and disable their regular communication with other cells.”
Why is this important?
“These are uncommon but extremely serious diseases, and patients require highly risky stem cell transplantation if they’re to survive. We want to learn more about these diseases so that we can find new therapies, and by studying what goes wrong in the immune system we learn a great deal about the molecular machinery that a healthy immune system needs.”
How are you going about this?
“My research group, which is made up of immunologists, geneticists and cell and molecular biologists, are analysing blood samples from patients and using cellular and experimental models to understand the molecular mechanisms of the diseases.”
What’s the next step in your research?
“The next step is to try to figure out how the cytoskeleton operates in the cell nucleus, which plays a crucial part in the mitotic processes when immune cells divide in order to attack a pathogen. We’ve also recently started to look into how a lack of gravity affects the immune cell skeleton, since astronauts who spend a long time in space show signs of immunodeficiency.”
About Lisa Westerberg
Professor of Experimental Immunology at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology
Lisa Westerberg was born in Järfälla, Stockholm, 1974. She holds a Master’s degree in molecular biology from Stockholm University and earned her PhD in cell and molecular biology at Karolinska Institutet in 2003. She did her postdoc research at Harvard Medical School, returning to Karolinska Institutet in 2009 to build her research group. In 2015 she was made docent in immunology. Lisa Westerberg was appointed Professor of Experimental Immunology at Karolinska Institutet on 1 January 2024.