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.
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Contact: communication@cmm.se
CENTER FOR MOLECULAR MEDICINE
L. TERENIUS AND V. VUKOJEVIC GROUP
Alcohol and Drug Dependence research
About
The Central Nervous System (CNS) is a highly complex dynamical system with great adaptive potential that arises from a vast network of molecular interactions and transporting processes. The dynamical organization of the CNS is essential for enabling living organisms to swiftly and steadily respond to unpredictable changes in their surroundings. Under the influence of substances of abuse (such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs) adaptive transformations take place that alter the workings of the CNS by changing the dynamics of molecular interactions in individual cells as well as interactions between cells forming the network. At the organism level, these changes manifest themselves as psychological and behavioral alterations, most notably craving, drug-seeking and compulsive use.
Our research on opioid receptor-mediated mechanisms underlying the development of alcohol dependence and addiction aims at understanding basic cellular and molecular mechanisms implicated in the development of alcohol dependence, identification of new biomarkers and the development of individualized pharmacotherapy for the treatment of alcohol abuse. We are using molecular genetics and high-resolution fluorescence imaging and correlation spectroscopy to characterize the cellular dynamics of proteins and perform quantitative biochemical studies of protein interactions in live cells. We are at the forefront of application of quantitative methods with single-cell and single-molecule sensitivity in biomedical research, and work on further advancement of the techniques.
A well-characterized database with samples from alcoholics including sib-pairs is being investigated in our group.
We are also interested and study in collaborative projects the dynamic regulation of gene transcription activation and cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurodegeneration.