Johan Lindberg

Principal Researcher at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (MEB), Karolinska Institutet, with a focus on biomarker discovery and cancer genomics assay development. Leading a multidisciplinary team comprising PhD students, postdocs, engineers, and bioinformaticians.

My team has established and is responsible for a sample- and analysis process at KI/SciLife to enable biomarker driven randomized clinical trials and prospective research projects. The process encompasses reception and storage of biomaterial, subsequent processing for Illumina sequencing and analysis using an in-house developed bioinformatics pipeline and curation software. The setup is made possible through collaboration with KI biobank and Clinical Genomics at SciLife lab. Since 2016 >5500 samples from >50 hospitals in 6 European countries have been analysed and reported. The main studies have been ALASCCA and ProBio. The first result from the ProBio trial was published in Nature Medicine and the ALASCCA trial met its primary endpoint which was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The sample- and analysis process has been optimized, enabling a two-week turnover of results even to trial sites in other countries such as Belgium. Consequently, the weekly team activities have strong similarities to a routine diagnostic setting with tight timelines and uptime requirements. To give patients in clinical routine access to improved diagnostics and state-of-the art genomics the iPCM (implementation of Personalized Cancer Medicine) project was launched in late 2020 with the goal to implement the research infrastructure for genomic profiling in clinical routine at Clinical Pathology, Karolinska Hospital. Hitherto, genomic analysis of prostate cancer,  ovarian cancer and colorectal cancer has been implemented as routine diagnostic tests with many more yet to come. 

Cancer genomics, liquid biopsy, assay development, clinical trials. 

Teaching subject area: Genetics, Cancer Genomics, Biotechnology, Bioinformatics. 

Responsible for the annual course Clinical Cancer Genomics. The course is aimed towards PhD students and postdocs performing research in the subject area. The course material is available upon request.

Course evaluations are available from 2022 and 2023. 

Supervision to doctoral degree

• Rebecka Bergström, 2024-
• Cecilia Merk, 2022-