News

25 million SEK for a project to study and inhibit bacterial virulence

Infection research in Umeå will receive considerable funding from the Swedish Council for Strategic Research (SSF). Within the SSF programme Molecular mechanisms in the interplay between microorganisms/parasites and their hosts (man, domestic animals, plants and forest trees) in relation to disease, nine research projects will be supported with a total of SEK 225 million, one project is hosted by Umeå University. Under the leadership of Mikael Elofsson a joint project with Karolinska institute will receive SEK 25 million over the next five years. From Umeå is also Åke Forsberg involved in the project which will focus on substances to study and inhibit bacterial virulence.

Fredrik Almqvist is co-applicant in a second project lead by Birgitta Henriques-Normark, professor at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and Linnaeus Visiting Professor at UCMR.

Read more in the press release on Umeå University's web page (in Swedish)

Read the press release from SSF (in Swedish)

Iain Mattaj: Honory Doctor at the Faculty of Medicine

web110531 MIMS launch 190Iain Mattaj Iain Mattaj is one of the two honory doctors of the Faculty of Medicine in 2013!

Iain Mattaj is the driving force behind the establishment of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine, with MIMS as the Swedish partner, the faculty says in its press release.

Iain Mattaj has played an important role also in the founding of MIMS with his support and advice for the recruitment of young MIMS group leaders.

Iain Mattaj visited Umeå several times and last time he was one of the invited speakers at the launch event for MIMS in 2011.

Read the whole press release in Swedish here:
http://www.medfak.umu.se/nyhet//.cid217390

Picture: Iain Mattaj at the MIMS launch event on 31 May 2011 in Umeå (picture by Marie Andersson)

Revealing the weapons by which bacteria fight each other: NATURE paper by Sun Nyunt Wai and colleagues

Vibrio cholerae biofilm copyright SNWai

Revealing the weapons by which bacteria fight each other

[2013-04-04] A new study which was performed jointly at Umeå University and the University of Washington in Seattle, USA, discovered that bacteria can degrade the cell membrane of bacterial competitors with enzymes that do not harm their own membrane. This exciting finding opens the way for the development of new antibacterial drugs to fight bacteria using their own weapons. (NATURE, 2013, DOI 10.1038/nature12074).

MIMS welcomes DANDRITE as new partner in the Nordic EMBL Partnership

DANDRITE, The Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience, is the fourth Nordic partner in The Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine. On March 5th a delegation from MIMS and Umeå University participated in the ceremony at Aarhus University to celebrate the official opening of DANTRITE together with representatives from EMBL and from the nodes and universities in Finland and Norway, FIMM at Helsinki University and NCMM at University of Oslo.

Dandrite inauguration2 Signed the new agreement of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine in Aarhus (from left to right):
Prof Poul Nissen, director for DANDRITE and Aarhus University, prof Thomas Wilhelmsson, Rector University of Helsinki, prof Lena Gustafsson, Vice-Chancellor Umeå University, Director General prof Iain Mattaj, EMBL, prof Lauritz B. Holm-Nielsen, Aarhus University, prof Ole Petter Ottersen, University of Oslo, and the directors for the three other Nordic partner nodes prof Olli Kallioniemi, (FIMM), prof Bernt Eric Uhlin (MIMS) and prof Kjetil Taskén (NCMM).

Nobel Laureate Brian Kobilka will visit Umeå University 12 December

Nobel Laureate Brian Kobilka will give a talk at Umeå University on 12 December, 11.00. In the afternoon he will also visit KBC and meet with young group leaders, PhD students, and highschool students. The professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2012 with Robert Lefkowitz, Duke University. Both are being honored for their discoveries about the structure and function of a common signal interceptor, the G protein-coupled receptors on the membranes of living cells.

Programmable RNA complex could speed genome editing in the lab - Publication in Science by Emmanuelle Charpentier and colleagues

[2012-06-29] For bacteria, snipping apart DNA that bears certain signature sequences is a defense mechanism. For scientists working in the lab, the same strategy can be a powerful research tool. With a newly discovered component of an adaptive bacterial immune system, scientists have identified a targeted method of slicing DNA that they say can be easily customized for a variety of applications in the lab.

Eric K Fernström Prize 2012 to Andrei Chabes

Andrei Chabes, group leader at MIMS and docent at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, will receive Umeå University's Eric K. Fernström prize 2012 for young and promising scientists. The prize committee at the Faculty of Medicine, Umeå University, decided to award Andrei Chabes for his "outstanding and innovative research on how DNA building blocks regulate important processes in the cell".

The prize amount is 100.000 SEK and Andrei will receive the prize at the Academic Autumn Ceremony at Umeå university. According to the founder of the prize, the ship-owner Eric K.Fernström, the Fernström foundation awards every year six young researchers at Sweden's six university medical faculties.

For the fourth time in a row the Faculty of Medicine at Umeå University selected a MIMS group leader. In former years Emmanuelle Charpentier, Jörgen Johansson, and Niklas Arnberg already received the prize.

Press release of Umeå University (in Swedish only available)
Web page of the Eric K. Fernström foundation at Lund University (in Swedish)

New EU course webportal for biomedical postgraduate courses: www.on-course.eu

on-course skärm_250 A new EU course webportal is available now!

On-course claims to be "the most comprehensive biomedical and medicines research and development postgraduate course portal in Europe".
on-course® is powered by EMTRAIN, the European Medicines Research Training Network. The EMTRAIN project is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) Joint Undertaking, a large-scale public-private partnership between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA.
From Umeå university and UCMR/MIMS the Laboratories for Chemical Biology Umeå (LCBU) at the department of chemistry are our EMTRAIN partners.

Find courses and more information available on

www.on-course.eu!

Seminar by John Overington webcasted from FIMM to Umeå

EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine (FIMM - MIMS - NCMM) joint Special Seminar at the Biomedicum in Helsinki.
Video transfer of the talk to Umeå and Oslo simultanously.

Speaker:

John Overington
EMBL Outstation - Hinxton,
European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK

Title:
A data mining synthesis approach to the discovery of impersonalised, robust and safe therapies

Niklas Arnberg receives 1 million SEK from Torsten Söderberg's Foundation

arnberg niklas thumb Niklas Arnberg, group leader at MIMS and professor at the Departement of Clinical Microbiology, is one of three Umeå University researchers who received funds from the Torsten Söderberg Foundation.
Niklas is funded with one million SEK for his research project "virus receptors: their role for tropism, therapy and targeting".

Read the press release from Umeå University (in Swedish)
More about the Torsten Söderberg foundation (in Swedish)

The project description (in Swedish)