Professor Anna Dimberg receives SEK 4.5 million over three years for her research on blood vessels as a goal for cancer therapy in treating brain tumours in children. In her research, she wants to use a new strategy to treat glioma, the most common type of brain tumour in children.

“By changing how the blood vessels work, we can both prevent the tumour cells from migrating along the vessels into the normal brain and also improve the opportunities for immune cells to get from the bloodstream into the tumour.”

Angelica Loskog, adjunct professor, receives SEK 3 million over three years for her research on immunostimulatory gene therapy to strengthen CAR-T cells. She is researching how to get the body’s immune system to attack and kill cancer cells, called cancer immunotherapy.

“The two tracks in my research begin to merge in such a way that I can first inject gene therapy into the tumour, which makes it very immunogenic, inflamed and susceptible. If you then insert CAR-T cells in that environment, the thesis is that these should survive even better in the cancer patient and thus be able to knock out the tumours better so that we get more long-term survivors.”