Sten Eirik Waelgaard Jacobsen.
Photo Ulf Sirborn

Cancer researcher Sten Eirik W. Jacobsen receives Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship in Medicine

The Royal. Academy of Sciences has decided to award Sten Eirik Waelgaard Jacobsen, Karolinska Institutet, the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship in Medicine 2015 "for his pioneering studies of the normal maturation of blood cells and cancer transformation".

Sten Eirik W. Jacobsen received the Tobias Prize in 2014 and will work for five years with funding from the Tobias Foundation. He will then take up the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship. The grant, totaling SEK 10 million, is funded by the Torsten Söderberg Foundation and enables full-time research for five years.

- Receiving the Torsten Söderberg Academy Professorship is an important recognition of our research. At the same time, it provides more long-term resources and an opportunity to focus on even more groundbreaking research - an opportunity for state-of-the-art research!" says Sten Eirik W. Jacobsen.

As one of the leading researchers in his field, hematopoiesis, Jacobsen focuses on how stem cells in the blood system form the body's different types of blood cells and immune system in the area of blood cell regeneration. In adults, several million new blood cells are normally formed every second and the blood-forming stem cells have the ability to balance the formation of red and white blood cells and platelets.

When the body goes from producing normal blood cells to producing cancer in the blood, it is called leukemia. To understand how leukemia and other blood diseases develop, a research team led by Jacobsen has been studying how a stem cell normally develops into different blood cells and how the different regulatory mechanisms work. They are doing this by studying a group of patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), a type of blood cancer that often develops into leukemia. They have also tried to identify and understand how leukemic stem cells arise. This is important to understand how MDS stem cells lead to leukemia and how to prevent relapse of the disease.

Jacobsen's research has identified stem cells and important precursors of blood formation that occur in stem cells, which are important in stem cell transplants used to cure both leukemia and other blood and immune system diseases.

In a stem cell transplant, the patient receives new, healthy stem cells, usually from another person, transferred into the body. By identifying key blood-forming stem cells and precursors, and their regulation, researchers hope to speed up the production of vital blood cells, which otherwise takes a long time. Another major problem is the relapse of leukemia or MDS after a stem cell transplant. By identifying the stem cells that cause relapse, Jacobsen's team can focus on how to better eliminate them before or after transplantation.