Paolo Parini

Academic and clinical roles
Paolo Parini is Professor of Clinical Chemistry at Karolinska Institutet and Director of Research, Education, Development & Innovation, as well as Senior Consultant in Endocrinology at the Theme Inflammation and Ageing, Karolinska University Hospital.

He serves as Coordinator of the Cardio Metabolic Unit (CMU), a research constellation driving innovative and implementable research and education in cardiometabolic diseases, closely integrated with specialised health care. In line with its translational mission, CMU brings together researchers and clinicians from:

• the Department of Medicine, Huddinge
• the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Campus Flemingsberg

His expertise spans the full translational continuum – from molecular and mechanistic studies of lipid and cardiometabolic biology to clinical implementation and drug discovery. He is co-inventor and co-owner of a patent for a new class of orally active PCSK9 inhibitors currently in phase I clinical development.

Translational research and international collaboration
Paolo plays a central role in building international research networks and collaborations, with a strong focus on translational and network medicine. He is:

• Academic Coordinator for the collaboration between Karolinska Institutet/Karolinska University Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School
• member of the Steering Committee of the Network Medicine Alliance
• member of the International Scientific Advisory Boards of the Dutch Heart Foundation, the Helmut Horten Foundation and EUCARE
• member of the Board of Directors of the CM Lerici Foundation
• member of the Healthcare Data Innovation Council
• Swedish national representative in the European Association for Predictive, Preventive & Personalised Medicine (EPMA)

He currently serves as a grant reviewer for:

• Dutch Heart Foundation
• Dutch Research Council
• Research Council of Finland
• Association of Collaborating Health Foundations (SGF) Top Sector Life Sciences and Health (LSH), Netherlands
• Austrian Science Fund

Leadership training and strategic roles
Paolo Parini has extensive formal leadership training, including several programmes within the International Leadership Community (Your Business Partner, Italy) with recurrent “Wave” courses focused on empathy- and values-based leadership.

He has also completed:

• TUFF Leadership Training (levels 1–2)
• Karolinska Institutet programmes Project Leadership for Research Leaders, Development of Leadership and Teams and The Personal Leadership
• UGL (Development of Group and Leader), Swedish Defence University

His leadership experience includes strategic roles within both university and university hospital settings, including:

• Director of Research, Education, Development & Innovation at Karolinska University Hospital
• coordinator of the EU FP7 project HUMAN
• member of the Karolinska Institutet Faculty Council
• member of the Scientific Committee of the Center Enrica Grossi Paoletti, Università degli Studi di Milano, at the Grande Ospedale Metropolitano Niguarda, Milano, Italy
• chair of scientific programme committees

He has also served as:

• member of the Executive Board and Treasurer of the European Atherosclerosis Society (EAS)
• Chairman of the Scandinavian Society for Atherosclerosis Research (SSAR)
• Swedish national representative in the European Lipoprotein Club

Paolo has been Karolinska University Hospital representative in the Research Lead, the Policy Working Group and the Clinical Trial Working Group of the European University Hospital Alliance (EUHA).

He leads cross-professional and international teams and has long experience of developing research environments, clinical activities and education in close collaboration.

Awards and visiting professorships
For his scientific and societal contributions, he has received several awards, including:

• Nikkilä Memorial Lecture Award, Scandinavian Society for Atherosclerosis Research (2024)
• Alvarenga’s Prize, Swedish Medical Society (1996)
• Paul Harris Fellow, Rotary International (2020)
• Livio Minguzzi Prize, Rotary Rimini, Italy (2020)
• Best Book of the Year, Gourmand World Cookbook Awards (2015)
• appointment as Officer, Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2011)

He has been visiting professor at:

• the University of Milano, Italy
• Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA

For more than three decades, Paolo Parini’s research has focused on bile acid, cholesterol, triglyceride and lipoprotein metabolism, including rare disorders such as familial dyslipidaemias, hypolipoproteinemi, and lipodystrophy. His work has contributed to understanding the mechanisms that link lipid and lipoprotein metabolism to atherosclerosis, cardiometabolic disease and liver disease, and link cholesterol metabolism to carbohydrate metabolism and beta-oxidation, and to translating these insights into new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies.

In recent years his research has shifted towards Network Medicine and Systems Medicine, with a strong emphasis on integrating multimodal, high-dimensional real-world health-care data with advanced experimental and multi-omics research data. He is particularly interested in how data-driven approaches can enable precision prevention and treatment in cardiometabolic disease, including drug repurposing and optimisation of lipid-lowering therapies. Current projects include the development of “virtual twins” for cardiometabolic disease, aiming to model individual patient trajectories and treatment responses by combining clinical, imaging, registry and molecular data.

He is currently Principal Investigator in two major EU Horizon projects, RePo4EU and dAIbetes, and in the EUROSTAR project CardioTwin.

Paolo Parini is actively engaged in teaching along the entire educational continuum at Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital. He teaches in undergraduate (medical and biomedical), advanced and doctoral courses, as well as in post-graduate and continuing professional development programmes for clinicians, clinical chemists and other health-care professionals.

His teaching covers cardiometabolic pathophysiology, lipid and bile acid metabolism, clinical chemistry, translational research methods and network/systems medicine. He has been responsible for core teaching in clinical chemistry within the MD curriculum and has contributed to the design and delivery of advanced courses in biomedicine and clinical research methodology. As main supervisor and co-supervisor, he has guided several PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom now hold independent academic or clinical positions, and he regularly teaches and mentors in leadership and research-development contexts within the university hospital.