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
MICHAEL SUNDSTRÖM TEAM
About
Michael Sundstrom received his PhD from Uppsala, followed by PostDoctoral studies at Karolinska Institute. From 1993-2000 he was at Pharmacia as Director for structure-based drug design and oncology R&D portfolio management. Between 2001 and 2003 he held senior positions at the Swedish Biotechs Actar and Biovitrum. In 2003 he joined the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the University of Oxford, as Chief Scientist. In 2007 he assumed the position as Managing Director for the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research (Copenhagen). From end of 2011, he was VP Discovery Research at Karolinska Development. He then re-joined the SGC and Karolinska Institutet and is since mid-2014 as Scientific Director for the SGC at KI.
Current Duties
Michael has three main research responsibilities 1) member of the global research leadership team coordinating projects and activities of common interest within the consortium; 2) site head for SGC Karolinska and 3) main scientific focus and responsibility for the SGC Tissue Platforms at Karolinska, Oxford and Montreal; working to establish high quality cell-based assays using patient-derived cell systems in inflammation and neurodegenerative diseases. The research activities carried out at the laboratory are focused on translational assays and target validation in systemic auto-immune diseases and inflammatory bowel diseases, as well as the generation of high quality recombinant antibodies.
Selected publications
Arrowsmith CH et al. The promise and peril of chemical probes. Nature Chemical Biology. 2015 Aug;11(8):536-41.
Edwards AM, Arrowsmith CH, Bountra C, Bunnage ME, Feldmann M, Knight JC, Patel DD, Prinos P, Taylor MD, Sundström M. Preclinical target validation using patient-derived cells. Nat Rev Drug Discov. 2015 Mar;14(3):149-50.
Knapp S and Sundström M. Recently targeted kinases and their inhibitors – the path to clinical trials. Curr Opin Pharmacol. 2014 Aug 8;17C:58-63.
Francavilla C, Rigbolt K, Emdal K, Vernet E, Bekker-Jensen D, Streicher W, Wikström M, Sundstrom M, Cavallaro U, Blagoev B, Olsen JV. Functional proteomics defines the molecular switch underlying FGFR2b trafficking and response. Molecular Cell. S1097-2765(13)00575-3.
Soundararajan M, Willard FS, Kimple AJ, Turnbull AP, Ball LJ, Schoch GA, Gileadi C, Fedorov OY, Dowler EF, Higman VA, Hutsell SQ, Sundström M, Doyle DA, Siderovski DP. Structural diversity in the RGS domain and its interaction with heterotrimeric G protein alpha-subunits. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Apr 29;105(17):6457-62.
Uhlén M, Graslund S, Sundstrom M. A pilot project to generate affinity reagents to human proteins. Nature Methods. 2008 5(10):854-5.
Fedorov O, Bullock A, Marsden B, Rellos P, Muller S, Schwaller J, Sundstrom M, Knapp S. Systematic Analysis of Ser/Thr Kinase Inhibitor Binding Profiles. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Dec 18; 104(51):20523-8.
Ng SS, Kavanagh KL, McDonough MA, Butler D, Pilka E, Benoit M. Lienard R, Bray JE, Savitsky P, Gileadi von Delft F, Rose RR, Offer J, Scheinost JC, Borowski M, Sundstrom M, Schofield CJ, Oppermann U. Crystal structures of human histone H3K9 and H3K36 demethylase JMJD2A reveal the basis for substrate specificity. Nature. 2007 5;448(7149):87-91.