Researcher, Fredrik Barrenäs
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Fredrik Barrenäs is conducting a bioinformatic study on pathogenic mechanisms in HIV. The aim is to discover how events during the acute phase of infection (encompassing roughly the first 10 days) establish the protracted inflammation that depletes the immune system and causes immune deficiency.
HIV infection follows a characteristic time course, which facilitates the discovery of key events that activate and protract inflammation. In addition, some species of nonhuman primate (NHP), such as rhesus macaque, follows a very similar time course. By contrast, other species, such as African green monkeys, don’t develop protracted inflammation and do not experience immune deficiency. Comparisons between these species allow specific analysis of pathogenic mechanisms. In combination with deep transcriptomic sequencing developed in recent years, such studies have become incredibly powerful. Here, key pathogenic events are identified using network and rule based methods. This enables the discovery of how coding genes, as well as noncoding transcripts, interact to drive pathogenesis.
Having received his PhD in bioinformatics from Linköping University in 2012, Fredrik received an International Postdoc grant from the Swedish Research Council the next year, and carried out his postdoc at the University of Washington in Seattle. Since 2016, Fredrik is a scientist at ICM, Uppsala University.