Bertha Brodin

I hold  a BSc in chemistry and pharmaceutics from Universidad Autonoma de Coahuila in Mexico. I obtained aPhD degree at the Karolinska Intitutet at the department of Tumor Biology, with a doctoral thesis on oncogenic virus gene regulation and therefter performed postdocoral studies at the Department of Biotechnology,  Royal Institute of Technology working on DNA sequencing of microdisected cervical cancer tissue, and become introduced to the molecular pathology world.

Triggered by my wish to continuing applying basic research into clinical settings I moved to the Department of Oncology and Pathology, Karolinska Institutet and became Associate Professor and Principal investigator in the area of Sarcoma. I worked in close contact with  sarcoma pathology and the sarcoma clinical team at the Karolinska University Hospital. We discovered a novel fusion gene in synovial sarcomas and contributed to the understanding of the genesis of these tumors,  identified potential drug treatments for sarcoma patients and  established infrastructure to perform drug testing on patient-derived sarcomas to guide oncological decisions. I also initiated PhD course of tumor histopathology that I succesfully led for 10 years. During 2016 and 2018 I was guest researcher at the Vancouver Cancer Agency, Canada  and at the Huntsman Cancer Intitute, Salt Lake City, USA and worked on innovative therapeutics for synovial sarcoma using high-through-put systems and animal models.

Presently, I am a Senior Researcher at the Department of  Applied Physics, Royal Institute of Technology and join a very creative and  multidisciplinary team that combine state-of-art  material sciences, X-ray physics and biomedicine to develop nanomaterias for imaging diagnostics and therapy (theranostics). Our group has developed  a  laboratory X-ray fluorescence system for iterative pharmacokinetic studies of nanomedicines, and an X-ray phase contrast micro computer tomography system for clinical use that enables high resoluton 3D images of human tumor tissue, so called "virtual histology", withouth the need of syncroton facilities.

Given my background in biomedical sciences and clinical network, my role is to develop in vitro and in vivo models to study the toxicity, functionality and host cell interactions of our novel teranostic nanomaterials. I also participate in the virtual histology project in which, together with pathologists and surgeons,  we characterize the histological structures from the phase contrast images of tumor biopsies such as surgical resection margins and response to neoadjuvant therapy. Naturally, I have  introduced these applications even in the sarcoma field, an agressive tumor type that affects children and young adults  and where there is a  need for medical improvements.