Curriculum vitae

Olli Kallioniemi, M.D., Ph.D. Director of Science for Life Laboratory (www.SciLifeLab.se), a national infrastructure for life sciences in Sweden and professor in Molecular Precision Medicine at the Karolinska Institutet.  He was previously the founding director of FIMM – the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (www.fimm.fi), as part of the Nordic EMBL partnership in Molecular Medicine (in 2007-2015, with 15% ongoing affiliation as a research director in 2015-2019). Olli Kallioniemi has a broad experience in launching and leading research organizations, promoting careers of young scientists, creating infrastructures and creative research environments and collaborating broadly within the Nordics, in the EU and globally. During his 30-year research career after PhD, he has spent 11 years in US and 3 years in Sweden.

Olli Kallioniemi received his M.D. in 1984, Ph.D. in 1988 and specialty training in laboratory medicine in 1991 at the University of Tampere in Finland, undertook a postdoc at UC San Francisco in 1990-1992 and was nominated as faculty at the National Human Genome Research Institute (1995-2002). Prof. Kallioniemi’s research group is currently active in individualized systems medicine of cancer, with a focus on improving the diagnostics and therapy of leukemia, prostate and ovarian cancer. Olli Kallioniemi has facilitated launch of grand challenge initiatives in personalized medicine in Finland and Sweden, involving close collaborations with hospitals, health care organizations and industry.

Olli Kallioniemi is an author of 378 PubMed publications (with 42,848 citations, H-index of 102). He is a member of the editorial board of six journals and invited lecturer in over 100 meetings during the past 5 years. He has supervised 27 doctoral theses. Dr. Kallioniemi has been a director and a member of Centers of Excellence (Academy of Finland and Marie Curie Center grant) 4 times, a co-PI in 11 EU framework grants and in one IMI grant, and participated in 4 ESFRI infrastructure networks. Kallioniemi has promoted European collaboration by serving in the board of the Nordic EMBL Molecular Medicine Partnership (https://www.nordicemblpartnership.org/) and in the EU Life organization (https://www.eu-life.eu/).

Olli Kallioniemi is an inventor and co-inventor of 21 issued patents, with a focus on diagnostic technology development, such as FISH, Comparative Genomic Hybridization, tissue microarrays, cell microarrays and bioinformatic methods. Many of these patents have been licensed for product development and applied to launch spinoff companies.

Prof. Kallioniemi is a recipient of multiple awards, such as the Anders Jahre Prize, NIH Director’s lecture, Harold G. Pritzker Memorial Lecture (Toronto), AACR team science award and the IFCC-Abbot Award for Molecular Diagnostics and national medical awards in Finland and Sweden. In January 2019 he was awarded the Matti Äyräpää Prize by the Medical Society Duodecim.

Olli Kallioniemi is a member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the National Academy of Science and Letters (Finland), European Academy of Cancer Sciences as well as the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet.

Research interests

Precision Cancer Medicine 

Making cancer care more effective and individualized is a central aim for cancer researchers worldwide. This is usually being pursued via DNA sequencing based efforts by the identification of oncogenic driver mutations. We believe and have emerging evidence that this will miss many therapeutic opportunities and additional endpoints including cell-based functional testing should be examined. Toward these goals, we carry out comprehensive ex vivo drug efficacy testing on patient-derived cells along with –omics profiling. We believe this approach will help to personalize treatment, aid in prioritizing drugs for clinical testing, provide for intelligent selection of drug combinations and improve treatment outcomes. Our work has a strong translational angle and is often carried out while the patient is receiving care. Our goal is to provide the treating clinician with additional treatment options should there be a need.

Initially we explored this functional drug testing platform in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) where the relevant material is more readily available. We have now also advanced to solid tumors including but not limited to ovarian, prostate and renal cancer. In solid tumors, relevant patient-derived ex vivo models are less readily available and the limited amount of tissue can be a challenge. Towards this we use different reprogramming methods of patient-derived primary cells in 2D, as well as 3D organoid cultures. We carry out genomics profiling of both tissue and model to ensure representativity of the cell models.

We have mapped the translational progress of our work into three phases, where phase I represents testing feasibility of model development. In phase II model development is doable, but representativity is still not optimal and no translation into treatment has been achieved. Phase III constitutes the final stage, where the cell models have generated actionable drugs that have been used in patient treatment. Our work is carried out in parallel both at the Science for Life Laboratory, Department of Oncology and Pathology, Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden and at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM in Helsinki, Finland.

Education information