Happy recipients of the Göran Gustafsson Prizes

“It was surprising because many young researchers have been recruited, and many of them are just as – or even more – competent than I am,” says a happy and slightly surprised Wojciech Michno.

He received this year’s Major Göran Gustafsson Prize, which includes a research grant of SEK 1.1 million over three years.

“It obviously made me very happy and will be of great help to the research group I am part of. As a young researcher, you often feel a bit insecure compared to the senior researchers who have been around for a long time. The prize is also a good confidence boost and recognition.”

In his research, Wojciech attempts to trace and identify various stress situations in cells that can lead to disease development. Additionally, his team is seeking new methods to observe these conditions, such as in cancer or various neurodegenerative diseases.

“We take a fundamental research perspective in the field, but it has significant translational potential in medicine. In neuroresearch, most have used mice to study neurodegenerative diseases, but the problem is that a mouse brain and a human brain are different. For example, a mouse would never develop Alzheimer’s. In our models, we can instead recreate what occurs in a human brain by using cell cultures from patients or healthy cells that we induce with genes of human origin. Against this, we can also test various drugs,” explains Wojciech Michno.

At the Intersection of chemistry and medicine

Wojciech’s research lies at the intersection of chemistry and medicine. Given his background and family, it is no surprise that this is where he ended up.

“My interest in neuroscience definitely comes from my mother, who is a neurologist. When I was little, I often accompanied her to work at a treatment centre for children with rare diseases in Poland, where we are from. I would go there after school and wait until she was done. I found it very boring at the time, but I also got to meet and play with children who I realised had it tough. It gave me a sense of how fortunate I was,” he says and continues:

“At the same time, many in my family are good at chemistry and have studied it. I picked it up, and the first thing I wanted to do when I started university was to combine economics and chemistry to study human behaviour. But I quickly switched to chemistry and neuroscience, and from there, my interest in both fields has only grown. Chemistry drives the entire function of the brain, and biology provides the conditions for things to happen.”

Long and short-term perspectives

The research Wojciech will conduct in the coming years, supported by the prize money, aims to make progress in both the short and long term.

“In the near future, I hope we can influence how we treat patients by being able to test many different drugs in a human context, as well as test drugs against specific diseased cells and see how the drugs affect healthy cells. In the long term, I believe we will be able to see how different types of biological stress cause disease in healthy cells and how we can incorporate this into preventive activities within a few decades,” concludes Wojciech Michno.

Aiming to alleviate pregnancy nausea

The other prize recipient, Luisa W. Hugerth, Researcher at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, was awarded the Minor Göran Gustafsson Prize of SEK 1.1 million for one year.

“The prize is amazing - both the scientific funding itself, of course, but also the dinner and everything around it. Our work as scientists is very often invisible and hard to explain, so it means a lot to be recognized publicly like that,” she says.

With the prize money, Luisa and her colleagues are aiming to study the saliva composition of pregnant women, to gain more insight into why some people experience a lot of nausea while others barely notice it.

“We already have promising data from faecal samples, but this will take us to the next step - and hopefully closer to a prevention strategy. With this funding I can finally generate the data that I have been missing for my studies,” she notes.

“Being in a bioinformatics lab, I have the advantage of being able to do a lot of my research on data available from previous studies. But that data is of course never perfectly tailored to our needs, so it will be very good to be in control of my own samples and data.”

Robin Widing