I am a senior researcher at the Norwegian Complement Research Group and senior consultant and Professor  in Critical Care Medicine at the Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive care medicine, Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet. I am currently also employed as project leader for organisational changes 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.

In addition, my work explores how amyloid fibrils activate the complement system, triggering sterile inflammation. By unraveling this complex interaction, we aim to uncover therapeutic strategies for diseases driven by chronic inflammation and amyloid deposition.

The projects within this topic aim to resolve this challenge by significantly reducing tissue injury in the course of sterile inflammation 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 sterile inflammation, especially ischemia/reperfusion injury and (2) to attenuate this  injury in vitro, ex situ , and in vivo with high potential for transfer to clinical studies.

The research focus is on deciphering the mechanism on how complement system activation is triggered leading to sterile inflammation and preventing the detrimental effects of ischemia/reperfusion in transplantation (kidney and liver). 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 situ 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:

• Co-Manager Norwegian Cancer Society grant (2023 – 2028) – 8MNOK
• Department of Anaesthesiology PhD student grant (2022-2028) – 3 MNOK
• 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.