After studying Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University Heidelberg, Germany and the University of Bergen, Norway, I obtained my Ph.D. from the EMBL and the Combined Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Heidelberg for work on primary cell culture development and tissue patterning based on phase-encoding using molecular oscillators.
In 2014, I moved to Karolinska Institutet as a MarieCurie fellow to work on the development and characterization of physiological hepatic model systems and became Group Leader in Personalized Medicine and Drug Development in 2017.
My research group uses 3D cell culture systems of primary human cells, microfluidics and integrative bioinformatics approaches to identify novel therapeutic strategies for complex metabolic diseases, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes. In addition, we develop algorithms to improve personalized pharmacological therapy and establish novel methods for the prediction of drug toxicity.
We put major emphasize on the dissemination of our discoveries in order to make innovations available to the public. To this end, we founded HepaPredict AB (www.hepapredict.com) a contract research organization (CRO) that got admitted into Karolinska Innovations DRIVE program. We offer in-house evaluations of drug metabolism, pharmacokinetic properties and safety as well as various liver disease models for drug discovery based on our novel long-term stable microphysiological 3D spheroid culture platform.