Two research infrastructures, one that Karolinska Institutet coordinates and one it participates in, have been awarded a grant in the Swedish Research Council's call for research infrastructure of national interest: the Chemical Biological Consortium and Protein Production Sweden 2.0. Seventeen other infrastructures have also been granted financing.
Two research infrastructures, one that Karolinska Institutet coordinates and one it participates in, have been awarded a grant in this year's Swedish Research Council call for research infrastructure of national interest: the Chemical Biological Consortium and Protein Production Sweden 2.0. All in all, the Swedish Research Council has issued grants totalling SEK 743 million to 19 applicants for the years 2026-2030.
Chemical Biology Consortium Sweden ( CBCS ) supports researchers in their development of new small molecular tools. It also hosts a library containing hundreds of thousands of small molecules and provides advanced equipment for studying their effect on proteins, cells, plants and viruses.
KI coordinated CBCS
CBCS was formed in 2010 and operates from six Swedish universities. It's director is Anna-Lena Gustavsson at KI's Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics .
CBCS's KI branch, which is based at SciLifeLab on the Solna Campus as one of KI's core facilities, provides expertise and instruments for method development and screening, and support for pharmaceutical chemistry, including synthetic and computational chemistry.
CBCS plans to invest the grant on further improvements to its support for Swedish researchers, which amongst other measures will involve facilitating chemical-biological studies in advanced cell models to improve translational relevance, implementing structural and AI-driven workflows for ligand identification and optimisation, and providing data-driven strategies to map mechanisms of action.
CBCS has applied for approximately SEK 64 million in the call, but the actual sum granted will be set after discussions between the Swedish Research Council and the administrating organisation.
PPS with five participating universities
Karolinska Institutet is also involved in Protein Produktion Sweden ( PPS ) 2.0, the second grant recipient. Here, KI is one of five participating universities in a national infrastructure that was established in 2022 and is coordinated by Gothenburg University.
PPS provides and develops methods for the production of proteins for the purposes of research. The infrastructure has applied for approximately SEK 59 million for 2027 to 2030, inclusive.
