Carolina Hagberg awarded ERC Consolidator Grant
CMM Group Leader Carolina Hagberg has been awarded a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant following a fiercely competitive application process. She will be using the money to further scientific knowledge about obesity-related cardiovascular disease.
The Consolidator grants are awarded by the European Research Council under the EU’s programme for research and innovation. Amongst this year’s grant recipients is Carolina Hagberg, senior researcher and docent of cell and molecular biology at Karolinska Institutet, as well as CMM Group Leader, who has been awarded EUR two million (roughly SEK 20 million) for five years.
Carolina’s group’s project, WATs-UP, explores the role played by adipose tissue in the development of obesity-related cardiovascular disease. Even though the association is a well-known one, what drives it has so far largely eluded scientists.
“Obesity gives rise to insulin resistance, high blood pressure and elevated levels of blood lipids, often simultaneously, which makes it hard to ascertain the exact role that the fat tissue has,” explains Carolina Hagberg.
To come to grips with the problem, the group combines unique mouse models, a 3D model of human fat tissue and fat biopsies from patients with cardiovascular morbidity. In so doing, they are able to study how the uptake of lipids by the adipose tissue affects the earliest pathogenic changes in the vascular wall of the aorta.
Our hypothesis is that it is altered lipid uptake into the adipose tissue, rather than just lipid release, that’s one of the main culprits,” says Carolina Hagberg.
While the project is at the level of basic research, it has the clear potential to pave the way for future therapies.
“We hope to unravel unknown disease mechanisms and identify novel opportunities to protect
people with obesity against cardiovascular comorbidities. That said, we also hope this will open up the adipose tissue as a niche for the development of new types of drugs to combat these diseases.”
Looking ahead
Dr Hagberg hopes that five years down the line, the project will have greatly improved the understanding the role great: adipose tissue plays in cardiovascular morbidity and their work will have opened up new research avenues. She describes the potential as great:
“We’re convinced that the project will generate a lot of new knowledge and inspire exciting new future projects.”
The text is based on an article from the Karolinska Institutet News website.