We summarise an exciting year of the Grimsholm lab where we have truly established the lab at Medical University of Vienna with the formal formation of the working group within the Institute of pathophysiology and Allergy Research and the habilitation of Ola in Immunology in May this year. The lab had its first retreat in Sopron, Hungary where we enjoyed both scientific and team building activities and finished with a wine tasting evening. Exciting times ahead with the projects progressing in a very good pace, both Bita and Rongqin have made substantial progress on their projects! Seva is now writing his first paper as a first author in a collaborative project with a longstanding mentor and friend, Prof. Lill Mårtensson at University of Gothenburg. Our previous Master students Alessia, Shirin and Anna are now
on one paper together which is in the making.
The lab published a paper on the cellular origin of leukemic cells in the two subtypes of chronic lymphocytic leukaemia with former Master Thesis student (now PhD student at University of Eastern Finland) Ahmed Mohamed as first author. We demonstrate that the mutated subtype of CLL is more closely related to CD27bright memory B cells from healthy donors and that germinal centre trajectory analysis indicates an earlier transformation in the GC of unmutated CLL vs the mutated subtype.
Two new Master Thesis students have started now in November, Lovro Kožul from the Molecular Precision Medicine Master programme of MUW and Animisha Salagrama from University of Skövde. Lovro will be working on metabolism changes in type 2 memory B cells and Animisha will be working on BCR sequencing analysis of these same cells.
Our traditional Nobel dinner of the Grimsholm lab will take place on the 15 th of December. Here we celebrate the multicultural lab with a dinner where each member brings a dish from their culture.