Biography
Professor Robert A. Harris
Professor Robert A. Harris (Bob) was born in Harpenden in Southern UK in 1966. He conducted a Bsc.Hons undergraduate degree at Portsmouth Polytechnic, majoring in Parasitology in 1987. PhD studies at University College London studying innate immune agglutinins in Schistosoma host snail species with Terry Preston and Vaughan Southgate as supervisors culminated with a thesis defence in early 1991. A 2.5 year postdoc at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in Paul Kaye’s research group ensued, with focus on understanding the intracellular fate of Leishmania spp. protozoans in macrophages. Bob was awarded a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellowship that permitted his relocation to the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) in the spring of 1994. A postdoc period was spent split between the labs of Anders Örn and Tomas Olsson, in which he studied Trypanosoma cruzi and Trypanosoma bruceii protozoan proteins. Bob became an Associate Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in 1999, heralding his establishment as a PI. Bob started to work with autoimmune diseases in 1996 and began study of therapy using live parasite infections or parasite molecules. His research group has developed autoantigen-specific vaccines, defined the effects of post-translational biochemical molecules on autoantigenicity and developed a macrophage adoptive transfer therapy that prevents pathogenesis in several experimental disease models. He became Professor of Immunotherapy in Neurological Diseases in 2013. In recent years research focus has centred on understanding the immunopathogenesis of incurable neurodegenerative diseases, with particular emphasis on development of immunotherapies directed at microglial cells as potential therapeutic paradigms.
Bob Harris CV July 2020
ERIK HERLENIUS GROUP
Development of autonomic control
About
Immature or deficient autonomic control is a common problem in infants born at a premature age and is of central importance in apneas, secondary hypoxic brain damage and sudden infant death syndrome.
PER ERIKSSON GROUP
Research
For better understanding of disturbances in respiratory control we study early development of cardiorespiratory control, brainstem neural networks and its associations with normal and pathological breathing. The conceptual change introduced by our recent data that endogenous prostaglandins are central pathogenic factors in respiratory disorders and the hypoxic response, open new diagnostic and therapeutic avenues that should significantly better the diagnostics and treatment of newborns and adult patients.
Inflammation is a major culprit in breathing disorders and we hypothesize that by using a newly developed urinary prostaglandin biomarker we can screen, detect and protect against inflammation related breathing disorders.
Our collaborative efforts enable us to move from a clinical problem to molecular understanding of the disease and studies are performed in patients, animal & in vitro models.
Our research is focused on the development of autonomic control with normal and paediatric patients as the target. Autonomic dysfunction in breathing and circulatory control often has its origin in neurodevelopment disorders. Furthermore, our basic research in developmental neuroscience how neural activity and stem cells form activity dependent networks is vital for the development of therapeutic interventions.
Read more
Contact: communication@cmm.se
CENTER FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE
FREDRIK WERMERLING TEAM
Autoimmune and inflammatory diseases – novel treatment strategies
About
Using experimental systems and patient material we study the immune system with a specific interest related to inflammation, autoimmune disease and cancer immunotherapy.
A major part of the different projects in the lab relates to antibodies, neutrophils and T cells. We also spend a lot of effort into using CRISPR/Cas9 based custom screens as a discovery platform to understand complex biological processes and to identify novel drug targets. To facilitate the design of these screens, we have developed a software that we call Green Listed. A blog post describing our approach can be found at Addgene.
Currently several projects in the lab relates to our interest in signaling downstream of the IL-4 receptor (IL-4R). The basis for this interest was the unexpected finding that the expression of the IL-4R is essential for the activity of a drug (IVIG) used to treat patients with autoimmune disease, and that the expression of this receptor is highly regulated during inflammation (Anthony et al, 2011, Nature and Wermeling et al, 2013, PNAS).
Selected publications
Link to publications on PubMed here.
Panda SK, Boddul SV, Jiménez-Andrade GY, Jiang L, Kasza Z, Fernandez-Ricaud L, Wermeling F. Green listed-a CRISPR screen tool. Bioinformatics. 2017 Apr 1;33(7):1099-1100.
Wermeling F, Anthony RM, Brombacher F, Ravetch JV. Acute inflammation primes myeloid effector cells for anti-inflammatory STAT6 signaling. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Aug 13;110(33):13487-91. PDF
Anthony RM, Kobayashi T, Wermeling F, Ravetch JV. Intravenous gammaglobulin suppresses inflammation through a novel T(H)2 pathway. Nature. 2011 Jun 19;475(7354):110-3.
Wermeling F, Lind SM, Jordö ED, Cardell SL, Karlsson MC. Invariant NKT cells limit activation of autoreactive CD1d-positive B cells. J Exp Med. 2010 May 10;207(5):943-52. PDF
Wermeling F, Chen Y, Pikkarainen T, Scheynius A, Winqvist O, Izui S, Ravetch JV, Tryggvason K, Karlsson MC. Class A scavenger receptors regulate tolerance against apoptotic cells, and autoantibodies against these receptors are predictive of systemic lupus. J Exp Med. 2007 Oct 1;204(10):2259-65. PDF