🩺 Meet Erik Lundqvist

MD, Surgical Consultant, PhD.
A native of Söderköping, Erik studied medicine at Linköping. The overall aim with his research is to improve the diagnosis and management of patients with colorectal cancer, affecting almost 7000 new individuals in Sweden each year.

🧬 Meet Carolin Jönsson

Research Engineer
Born in southern Germany, Carolin trained at the Max‑Planck Institute and later worked in Switzerland and Toronto before moving to Sweden in 1993.

🩺️ Meet Karin Johansen

MD, PhD
From Gothenburg, Karin graduated from Linköping’s medical school in 2018. Her PhD was in pancreatic surgery, cost‑effectiveness, and quality of life.

🔬 Meet Jonas Burman

PhD candidate
Raised in Karlstad, Jonas moved to Linköping for his bachelor's in biology and later completed a master’s in Experimental & Medical Biosciences in 2022. He did an international exchange in the Lyden lab, at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

🩺 Meet Bergthor Björnsson

MD, PhD, Docent / Senior Consultant
Bergthor’s clinical and translational research centers on pancreatic and liver surgery—he has led randomized and multicenter trials at Linköping.

🩺 Meet Elena Arlaman

MD, PhD candidate
Elena was born and raised from Syria and studied pharmacy at Damascus University before relocating to Sweden in 2014, and completing MD training at Linköping University. She's currently an oncology resident and researcher.

🧫 🩺 Meet Håkon Andersen Blomstrand

Pathologist, MD PhD
Originally from Uppsala, Håkon earned his medical degree at Gothenburg in 2013 and his PhD last year at Linköping's University.

🧪 Meet Linda Bojmar
PhD, Assistant Professor, Docent
Linda trained in Linköping and completed her post‑doc at Weill Cornell, focusing on extracellular vesicles and cancer progression.

From our lab, Linda presented a talk on the hepatic #preMetastatic niche in #pancreaticcancer and how systemic effects of cancer may serve as biomarkers for metastasis.
Meanwhile, Mohamed, @jonasburman.bsky.social, and Verena contributed with poster presentations showcasing their exciting work!

This year was the 7th Swedish Cancer Research Meeting #SCRM and for the first time @liu.se @liucancer.bsky.social took part in the national programme committee. A big thanks to Lund University Cancer Centre @lunduniversity.bsky.social for hosting this year’s gathering! This is our lab's insight:

Recently, we got to celebrate our postdoc Mohamed Elhusseiny. 2025 grant awardee from Dr Per Håkansson’s Foundation for Research!
With this grant, we will explore a unique metabolic vulnerability in cancer cells: methionine dependency.

Did you know that cancer cells are addicted to methionine? 👀

Verena Unterkircher was awarded the Young Cancer Research Award by the Swedish Cancer Association PALEMA. Thanks to this grant, she’ll keep pushing forward her project on identifying biomarkers for pancreatic cancer. 🔬✨ #cancerresearch #womeninscience

"Once the tumour has spread to the liver, most patients unfortunately end up dying from the metastatic disease. One of the goals of this study was to try to capture early steps in the initiation of liver metastasis." -Constantinos Zambirinis

The most interesting thing is that there are differences in the liver depending on how the patients are progressing. We see markers for various changes that seem to have an impact on the spread of cancer, and that will be very exciting to follow up in expanded studies.

A liver biopsy may predict spread of pancreatic cancer.
This discovery holds the potential to improve how we anticipate disease progression and prevent pancreatic cancer from spreading to other organs.

We had the opportunity to take part in the very first Swedish Extracellular Vesicles Network meeting in Stockholm! 🧬
We presented our latest findings on cancer EVs as mediators of systemic disease. We got to say hejhej to our friend and colleague, David Lyden, who came all the way from New York!