Johan Lindberg

Johan Lindberg

Principal Researcher | Docent
Telephone: +46852482616
Visiting address: Nobels väg 12a, 17165 Solna
Postal address: C8 Medicinsk epidemiologi och biostatistik, C8 MEB Grönberg Lindberg, 171 77 Stockholm
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About me

  • 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 has 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 and ovarian cancer has been implemented as routine diagnostic tests with many more yet to come. 

Research

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

Teaching

  • 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. 

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Liquid biopsies in metastatic prostate cancer
    Swedish prostate cancer foundation
    1 February 2024 - 1 February 2026
  • Swedish Cancer Society
    1 January 2024
    This project was started to develop precision medicine for disseminated prostate cancer. All healthy individuals have DNA from dead cells in their blood. In patients with cancer, some of the free-floating DNA in blood comes from the cancer cells. This DNA is called circulating tumor DNA. In this project, new technology will be used to explore different uses for circulating tumor DNA, for example whether it can be used to follow treatment response and determine treatment choices. The project will study disseminated prostate cancer and all treatments used to treat this disease. The project is about using newly developed technology to identify biomarkers through analysis of circulating tumor DNA. The goal of this project is to provide oncologists with a tool to better follow and understand whether a patient is responding or not responding to a treatment by monitoring ctDNA levels in blood over time. Another goal is to improve treatment choices through analysis of circulating tumor DNA.
  • Liquid biopsies in metastatic prostate cancer
    Radium Hemmets Research Funds
    1 January 2024 - 1 January 2026
  • Detection of inactivating genomic alterations in BRCA1/2 and establishment of a tissue selection algorithm to maximise the probability of successful screening.
    AstraZeneca (Sweden)
    1 January 2024 - 31 December 2026
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2022 - 31 December 2025
    The lack of treatment-predictive biomarkers is an unmet clinical need in metastatic prostate cancer leading to inferior clinical outcomes, overtreatment and accelerating costs. The ProBio study (NCT03903835) is an ongoing randomized trial that builds on a novel adaptive study design and prospectively evaluates treatment predictive biomarker signatures in a large network of over 35 study centers in Europe. By using ProBio we will be able to rapidly evaluate both new and old drugs in subsets of patients with similar genomic biomarker. If successful, patients with prostate cancer will get individualized treatment based on treatment-predictive genomic biomarker signatures in the near future.To test this hypothesis, we will use a multiphase randomized study using an outcome-adaptive multi-arm biomarker-driven study design. We have the following main aims: To investigate if treatment decisions based on a biomarker signature identified by sequencing circulating tumor DNA improves progression free survival (primary endpoint)To ultimately show that the ProBio concept is a model for collaboration between academia and industry in the evaluation of new drugs in prostate cancer
  • Swedish Cancer Society
    1 January 2021
    Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in Sweden. Although survival is 92% after 5 years, prostate cancer takes the most lives of all cancer types. A challenge with prostate cancer is that many men carry a completely harmless cancer that will not cause any symptoms if left undetected. The widespread PSA testing therefore leads to unnecessary side effects and costs to society. The Stockholm3 test is a blood test based on a combination of biomarkers that was developed to meet these challenges. Combined with new technology that improves the precision of biopsy, the problems have decreased but there is room for improvement. To reduce the problems in screening for prostate cancer, new types of biomarkers are needed. One such biomarker is DNA remnants from dying cancer cells which can be purified and analyzed from plasma. Such DNA residues are called circulating tumor DNA. In this research project, circulating tumor DNA will be analyzed from patients diagnosed with prostate cancer as well as healthy individuals to investigate whether circulating tumor DNA has the potential to identify those men who need treatment and those who should not. The goal of this research is to develop a diagnostic test to improve screening for prostate cancer.
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2021 - 31 December 2024
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2021 - 31 December 2023
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2020 - 31 December 2020
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2019 - 31 December 2022
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2018 - 31 December 2020
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 December 2017 - 31 December 2020
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2013 - 31 December 2016
  • Swedish Research Council
    1 January 2010 - 31 December 2012

Employments

  • Principal Researcher, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, 2022-

Degrees and Education

  • Docent, Karolinska Institutet, 2025

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