In early November, as many as fifteen SciLifeLab group leaders received project, consolidator, and starting grants from the Swedish Research Council call in Medicine and health sciences.
The purpose of the Swedish Research Council’s project grant is to give researchers the freedom to formulate their own research concept, method and implementation, and to solve a specific research task within a limited period.
SciLifeLab researcher Mikael Sellin (UU) received a consolidator grant for a project “Bacterial Breaching of a Physiologically Arranged Intestinal Epithelial Barrier”.
”Aggressive bacteria can invade body tissues and cause serious diseases. Due to the rapid spread of antibiotic resistance, this is becoming an increasing problem. Traditionally, researchers have used very simple experimental systems to understand how bacterial invasion of tissue occurs, which has limited our knowledge of these processes”, he says.
He will now investigate this by growing human tissues and studying the bacteria in hopes of identifying the key stages of the infection and then blocking them.
“By growing human tissue outside the body from stem cells, our group can now instead study how aggressive bacteria, such as Shigella, Salmonella, and Campylobacter, attack our tissues under conditions that largely mimic the human body. In this way, we hope to identify key stages of the infection, and by extension new ways to block them”, Mikael explains.
The grant from the Swedish Research Council will be used for recruitment and development.
“The consolidator grant will be used to recruit new employees and develop our methods to follow dynamic processes in infected tissue down to millisecond level”, he says.
The following researchers from the SciLifeLab community were granted funding from this year’s Swedish Research Council call for Medicine and health sciences:
• Olli Kallioniemi (KI)
• Petter Brodin (KI)
• Nicola Crosetto (KI)
• Erik Fransén (KTH)
• Daniel Fürth (UU)
• Anna Herland (KTH)
• Ulf Landegren (UU)
• Per O. Ljungdahl (SU)
• Yumeng Mao (UU)
• Mats Nilsson (SU)
• Mikael Sellin (UU)
• Staffan Svärd (UU)
• Fredrik Swartling (UU)
• Lene Uhrbom (UU)
• Mia Wadelius (UU)