Department of Cell and Molecular Biology

The 5D Heart Patch Project, led by Prof Kenneth Chien, has identified human ventricular progenitor (HVP) cells that can create self-assembling heart grafts in vivo. The research has the potential to offer hope to millions of people suffering from heart failure.

An ERC Advanced Grant supported the 5D-Heart Patch program with the ambitious goal of unlocking the therapeutic potential of generating billions of human heart precursors or “progenitors” from human embryonic stem cells by forming muscle graft patches in the intact heart. The program has reached its initial goals and is now completed.

Professor Rickard Sandberg has been awarded the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship in Medicine by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a donation of 10 million Swedish kronor for a five-year period. Rickard Sandberg has developed methods that make it possible to deeply penetrate the human genome by studying genes in individual cells.

“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.”

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and at Yale University in USA have uncovered how stem cells behave in real-time while adapting their gene expression for differentiation. The study is published in the scientific journal Nature Cell Biology.

Skin is essential for protecting our body from outside harm, such as injury, microbes, and radiation. This protective skin function is maintained by the tireless effort of resident stem cells to self-renew (remain stem cells) and differentiate (produce specialized cells) throughout our lifetime.

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.