Swedish Cancer Society visits SciLifeLab

his morning, more than 70 representatives from the Swedish Cancer Society visited SciLifeLab, including Secretary-General Ulrika Årehed Kågström.

SciLifeLab Director, Olli Kallioniemi, welcomed the group and gave a brief introduction of SciLifeLab’s past, presence and future. 

“The whole point of SciLifeLab is to connect life sciences with the latest technology. We have around 1300 individual users and 3000 project carried out at the Scilifelab units every year” says Olli Kallioniemi.

Olli Kallioniemi also highlighted SciLifeLab’s efforts in cancer prevention.

“All of the biobanks we have here in Sweden provide excellent opportunities to obtain samples, profile them and find out how well we can predict cancer. Our treatments for cancer have already shifted to be very tailored and I think that cancer prevention strategies also needs to become more tailored in order for us to understand how to move forward” explained Olli Kallioniemi.

The day ended with a tour of the three researchers laboratories, among them the Cryo-EM unit.

The introduction was followed by presentations made by three SciLifeLab researchers who all have received funding from the Swedish Cancer Society.

First out was Alexey Amunts (Stockholm University), who talked about how proteins are synthesized, folded and assembled into functional multicomponent membrane complexes; Cecilia Williams (KTH), who asked the question: Does estrogen protect against bowel cancer and how?; which was followed by the last speaker, Sean Rudd (Karolinska Institutet) who talked about how we can improve current chemotherapies.