I am a senior researcher at the Norwegian Complement Research Group and senior consultant in Critical Care Medicine at the Department for Anaesthesiology and Intensive care medicine, Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet currently also employed as assisting Section Leader at this department.

I am the topic leader of complement-related sterile inflammation. Sterile inflammation is dependent on Complement System and Toll-like receptor activation. We aim to attenuate this inflammation by therapeutic inhibition.

Ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury is a key challenge in a number of widespread diseases like heart infarction, circulatory arrest, traumatic injury, and organ transplantation. These conditions have different etiologies, but the underlying mechanism is the same, i.e. cell death due to the stop of blood supply during ischemia and aggravation of organ damage after the restoration of blood supply during reperfusion.

The projects within this topic aim to resolve this challenge by significantly reducing tissue injury in the course of I/R using a novel and groundbreaking therapy of double inhibition of the innate immune system, namely the complement system and the toll-like receptors (TLR).

My overall research aim is (1) to describe innate immunity mechanisms in ischemia/reperfusion injury and (2) to attenuate the reperfusion injury both in vitro and in vivo with high potential for transfer to clinical studies.

The research focus is on preventing the detrimental effects of ischemia/reperfusion in transplantation (kidney and liver) and myocardial infarction. My group has developed unique models of hypoxia/reoxygenation of cultured endothelial cells in combination with a full blood model and the use of ex vivo machine perfusion to simulate reperfusion in porcine kidneys, porcine and human livers. I am heading the research part of clinical machine perfusion of livers at Oslo University hospital.

Grants:

• Project leader – Open project support by the South-Eastern Norwegian Health authorities (2020-2023) – 9 MNOK
• Simon-Fougner Hartmann family foundation (2019-2020) – 400 TNOK
• UiO:LifeScience “3DR” consortium (2020-2024) – 3 MNOK
• Scholar of the “Young Research Talent” program of the Norwegian Research Council (2018 – 2021) – 9 MNOK
• Department of Anaesthesiology Research Grant (2017-2021) – 20% PostDoc position

Supervision:
I am the main supervisor of 3 Ph.D. students and 1 PostDoc in addition to being co-supervisor of 3 Ph.D. students.