Anna Wedell is awarded the 2019 Forska!Sverige science award

The Swedish foundation Forska!Sverige is awarding Anna Wedell (SciLifeLab/KI) with its Research Award 2019. The professor of Medical Genetics wins the award based on her research accomplishments regarding detection of congenital and hereditary metabolic disorders in children. She will receive the award in conjunction with the Forska!Sverige-day on October 2nd.

Today, around one in every two thousand children is born with metabolic defects resulting in hundreds of unusual conditions. These are caused by hereditary genetic defects that can often lead to brain damage.

“Through high-tech genetic detective work, Anna Wedell and her research group have found the molecular basis for several of these metabolic diseases. With this award we want to pay attention to her important work to save lives”, says Anna Nilsson Vindefjärd, Secretary-General at Forska!Sverige in a press release.

Through her research, Anna Wedell has created conditions to integrate the new, large scale, analysis methods into healthcare so that they can be used quickly and safely for the diagnosis of rare hereditary diseases. This enables large groups of patients to be diagnosed early on in the disease making it possible to use individualized treatment and in some cases even prevent severe disabilities. Anna Wedell has also discovered entirely new disease mechanisms, which has shed light on the brain’s normal metabolism and enables the development of new future treatments.

“Our biggest success factor is that we have succeeded in creating an integrated environment where we combine highly specialized clinical medicine, laboratory medicine, large-scale genomics and basic experimental science. For our patients to benefit from the rapid technological development and explosion of knowledge we are in, more cross-border and interdisciplinary work is needed where health care has an important role”, says Anna Wedell in the press release.