NEWS The Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS) announces four recipients of the 2025 MIMS Investigator Award, recognizing early-career group leaders with a strong track record.
The award aims to foster interactions between Swedish scientists and the EMBL network. MIMS Investigators receive financial support for networking for four years, benefit from training opportunities, and receive 2 million SEK towards a collaborative research project. They become part of an international network of group leaders and clinical fellows working in the broad area of molecular medicine who are based at MIMS, its Nordic Partners and other EMBL institutes.
The award is enabled by support from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Kempestiftelserna and Umeå University to MIMS.
Andreas Luttens, DDLS Fellow at Karolinska Institutet, is one of the award winners.
Image Maria Nemchuk, Broad InstituteAndreas Luttens aims to leverage artificial intelligence as an oracle in the design of next-generation anti-infectives. His project is to establish the RAPID (Robust Accelerated Protease Inhibitor Discovery) platform for generating combinatorial peptide libraries with DNA barcodes to facilitate screening applications.
“By integrating high-throughput experimentation with deep learning, the platform is designed to deliver potent antiviral candidates within unprecedented timelines”, says Andreas, “Beyond pandemic preparedness, its modular architecture enables efficient adaptation to a broad range of disease areas. I anticipate many collaborations within the MIMS community will be supported by this technology.”
Annasara Lenman, Professor in Virology at Umeå University, is one of the award winners.
Image Andreas LenmanAnnasara Lenman’s project will employ advanced 3D infection models to discover immune-related functions of human microproteins, with a particular emphasis on hantavirus infection. Her expertise combines patient-derived materials, 3D lung tissue, and transcriptomics to reveal novel virus–host mechanisms.
Annasara states “this research will advance our understanding of hantavirus pathogenesis by shifting focus to the respiratory phase of infection, with potential implications for earlier diagnosis and intervention. In the longer term, identifying host susceptibility factors and regulatory microproteins may reveal novel antiviral targets and contribute to the development of precision medicine approaches for severe viral infections where treatment options are currently lacking.”
Annasara’s collaboration with MIMS Group Leader Iker Aramburu is expected to foster innovative interdisciplinary research at the interface of infection medicine, proteomics, and translational biology.
Kristoffer Sahlin, Assistant Professor and SciLifeLab Fellow at Stockholm University, is one of the award winners.
Image Niklas Norberg WirténKristoffer Sahlin develops scalable algorithms for analyzing large sequencing datasets, with a focus on read mapping to massive metagenomics datasets within the MIMS. As sequencing technologies advance and the datasets expand rapidly, his work addresses critical computational bottlenecks in genomics, metagenomics, and transcriptomics.
“Recent technological advancements in DNA sequencing have led to an exponential increase in both sequencing data and the number of available genomes and metagenomes in public sequence databases,” says Kristoffer, “Mapped reads provide the fundamental information used in a range of biological, environmental, and biomedical analyses, but read mapping has become impossible in several applications with rapidly growing sequencing databases.”
Working at the interface of mathematics, computer science, genomics, and population-scale datasets, Kristoffer Sahlin will find interesting challenges among MIMS and EMBL projects generating large quantities of sequence reads from bulk and single-cell metagenomics approaches.
Max Renner, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Umeå University, is one of the award winners.
Image Mattias PetterssonMax Renner is a virologist and cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) expert with a strong track record of scientific productivity at earlier career stages. In the MIMS Investigator project, Max will investigate the Rift Valley fever virus. His work will visualize viral assembly inside both human and mosquito cells at near-atomic resolution, providing crucial insights into a climate-sensitive pathogen electron microscopy and cellular tomography.
Max comments “Rift Valley fever virus is a major mosquito-transmitted pathogen. As a warming climate expands the distribution of mosquito species, the risk posed by such viruses is expected to grow. The gained insights will help us understand the replicative cycle of this pathogen and are crucial for identifying weak points in Rift Valley fever virus that can be targeted further down the line.”
MIMS director Oliver Billker says, “I congratulate these four talented scientists and welcome them to the MIMS community, where they can participate in our Nordic Partnership with EMBL. One important task of the Swedish EMBL Node is to create meaningful connections between early career group leaders across Sweden with the EMBL community and the MIMS Investigator award is one way to achieve this.”
A new call for MIMS Investigator Awards is expected to open in the autumn of 2026.