The last online seminar of 2023 will take place on December 21st from 16:00-17:00. The keynote speaker will be Professor Stener-Victorin from the Department of Physiology and pharmacology at Karolinska Institutet. The junior speaker for this seminar is to be determined.
Photo: Anneli Nygårds
“Dissecting mechanisms of polycystic ovary syndrome”
Professor Stener-Victorin is an internationally recognized scientist in the field of reproductive endocrinology and metabolism. Here Reproductive Endocrinology and Metabolism Group is at the forefront of bridging preclinical and clinical investigations in the field of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). The overarching aim of their research is to gain deeper understanding of the heritability of the syndrome and associated comorbidities such as metabolic dysfunction including type 2 diabetes across generations by dissecting the molecular, mechanistic, and causal links. Moreover, we translate our findings in mice to the clinical situation and perform detailed phenotyping of women with and without PCOS and currently perform single-cell transcriptomic analyses and investigate the effect of different treatments. She has published >200 articles, is a frequently invited speaker, and was recently involved in the update and expansion of the international Evidence-based guideline for the assessment and management of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome 2023. Recently, she was awarded the Distinguish Investigator Grant, Novo Nordisk Foundation(2022). Moreover, she was president of the Androgen Excess and PCOS Society (AE-PCOS Society) from September 2018 until November 2020 and is now the chief scientific officer for the organization.
E-mail: elisabet.stener-victorin@ki.se
Web page: Reproductive Endocrinology and Metabolism Group
Twitter account – Elisabet Stener-Victorin Lab: @ElisabetStener-Victorin
““The sexy side of ghrelin: how the “hunger hormone” differentially impacts feeding and metabolism in males and females”
Karina Prins, MSc is a Nutrition Scientist, graduated from Wageningen University in 2017. From 2018 to 2023, she worked on her PhD research in the laboratory of Metabolism and Reproduction in the department of Internal Medicine of Erasmus MC (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), under the supervision of dr. P. Delhanty and dr. J.A. Visser. Currently, she is working as a lecturer in biochemistry .
During her PhD studies, Karina investigated the functional and physiological actions of ghrelin, a gut hormone, in metabolism. Her first research line aimed to unravel sex differences in ghrelin signalling in vivo. Using a mouse model of binge eating behaviour, she demonstrated that ghrelin deficiency caused behavioural changes in females, while mainly altering metabolism in males. As a follow-up to this study, she investigated the effects of mild hyperandrogenism on ghrelin signalling in female mice. In her second line of research, Karina performed fundamental studies on the interaction between the ghrelin receptor (GHSR) and other membrane proteins. Using in vitro functional assays, she characterized the previously unknown interaction between syndecans, a group of heparan sulphate proteoglycans, and GHSR. She also investigated the effects of several obesity-related variants of MRAP2 on its ability to modulate GHSR activity.
Karina has presented her work at several national and international conferences, for which she was awarded multiple prizes, including an Outstanding Abstract Award (ENDO 2023), Young Investigator Awards (Women in Endocrinology, 2021&2023), and the Best Basic/Translational Abstract Award (Dutch Endocrine Meeting 2022).