Department of Cell and Molecular Biology

Enric Llorens is one of the researchers that have been awarded the 2022 ERC Starting Grant. For the project concern self-repairing injured tissues in mammals.

The European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG) aims at supporting up-and-coming research leaders, who are building their research teams and are on their way to establish their own line of research. In all, the European Research Council will support 408 early-career researchers with this prestigious grant. The researchers included in the programme are awarded up to EUR 1.5 million over a five-year period. In total, the ERC in this year’s call will invest EUR 636 million in young research leaders around the world.

Group leaders Maria Kasper and Pekka Katajisto from CMB recives 32 MSEK from Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW) for their project Metabolic control at the stem cell’s point of no return.

In all, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation is distributing SEK 700 million to 23 basic research projects at Swedish universities over a period of five years.

“The evaluations are based entirely on international competitiveness and are conducted by a handful of prominent researchers in each project's research area. It is nice to see that there are so many projects in Sweden that maintain that quality and that more and more women are stepping forward as research leaders,” says Siv Andersson, responsible for basic research issues at the Foundation, in a press release.

A new study published in Cell Chemical Biology describes an alternative approach to treat diabetes by identifying drugs directly increasing the number of incretin-expressing cells. The work results from researchers at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology.

Heart progenitors spontaneously regenerate cardiac muscle via a tight junction “honeycomb” in salamanders.

Whether there are endogenous adult heart progenitors that can replenish damaged muscle cells remained controversial. Now researchers at Karolinska Institute in Sweden show that the outermost layer of the heart, called epicardium acts as a source of cardiac muscle cells through formation of an intriguing honeycomb-like structure.

The study, published in Nature Cell Biology, identifies a new paradigm for heart regeneration by studying a salamander model for heart regeneration and reports an important role for tight junctions in the process.