Group news
December 2025:
Siri Flåm and Marte Heimli presented our groups experiences with sequencing 1.6 million single cell and using different spatial technologies at the research section seminar at Grefsenkollen.
Natalie Sønsthagen Eliassen obtains her master’s degree on the thesis entitled: “Dissecting peripheral blood and thymic B cell receptor repertoires in Myasthenia gravis to understand thymectomy response”. Main supervisor: Marte Heimli. Co-supervisors: Marte K. Viken and Benedicte A. Lie. Local supervisor at NTNU: Berit Johansen.
Benedicte Lie was interviewed by forskning.no about a new study by a group at Stanford who combined single cell transcriptomics and EBV detection to characterize EBV infected B cells.
Link: Er det kyssesykeviruset som står bak lupus? (forskning.no)
November 2025:
Anne Rydland defended her thesis entitled: “Extracellular vesicles and their protein cargo in early rheumatoid arthritis and response to methotrexate treatment” with constructive discussion with her opponents An Hendrix and Helena Harris. Bjørn Skålhegg chaired the evaluation committee, and the chair of the defense was Marit Inngjerdingen.
Martine Mesel attended the «EVs in immunity» conference in Athens, Greece, where she presented her poster with the title «An investigation of Plasma EV Protein Cargo Across Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Subtypes».
October 2025:
Fatima Heinicke recieved funding from Norsk Revmatikerforbunds Forskningsfond for the project: «Metaboliske markører til klassifisering av pasienter med tidlig inflammatorisk artritt for å oppnå en tidligere diagnose».
Link: Årets tildeling fra NRFs Forskningsfond er klar (revmatiker.no)
Donia Jamal Ramadan presented her work on single cell profiling of cerebrospinal fluid from narcolepsy patients at the European Narcolepsy days in Istanbul.
Marte Viken was interviewed about a British proof-of-concept study for development of a blood-based diagnostic test for ME/CFS both by Dagbladet: Gjennombrudd i ME-forskning: Blodprøve kan påvise sykdommen and by forskning.no: Ny blodprøve fant ME hos svært syke pasienter
September 2025:
Marte Heimli conducted a research stay with Sarah Teichmann’s group in Cambridge from mid- September until end of October.
Fatima Heinicke attended the Scandinavian Conference of Rheumatology. She presented Martine Mesel and Øyvind Bakke’s study with preliminary results from comprehensive single-cell analysis exploring the cellular landscape in JIA joints and peripheral blood) as well as her own single cell study: Zooming in on CD19+ B cells in DMARD-naïve RA patients using single-cell sequencing.
August 2025:
Chenqu Suo (Chenqu Suo) from Sarah Teichmann’s lab visited us for a week to discuss our juvenile idiopathic arthritis single cell atlas.
Marte Viken was interviewed by forskning.no about the results from the largest genetic study performed in ME by the UK DecodeME: Gigantisk studie så på genene til ME-syke – dette fant de
June 2025:
Maria Vigeland and Benedicte Lie attended the European League against Rheumatism conference in Barcelona.
Øyvind Bakke and Marte Heimli attended the conference Imaging the immune system VI in Wurzburg.
May 2025:
Martine Mesel, Siri Flåm and Benedicte Lie attended the 44th European Workshop for Rheumatology Research 2025 – EWRR» conference in Budapest, Hungary. Martine presented her poster on Single Cell analysis in JIA patients entitled «Exploring the Cellular Landscape in JIA Joints with Single Cell Analysis».
Marte Viken presented her groups work on immunogenetic studies of ME at the InvestinME conference at the Sanger center.
Marte Heimli gave an oral presentation of her single cell studies of the thymus at the 15th MGFA international conference on myasthenia and related disorders in Haag.
March 2025:
Øyvind Bakke received REMEDY Young Research Grant and present his work on spatial transcriptomics of synovial biopsies from juvenile idiopatic arthritis patients.
February 2025:
We received funding from Foreningen for muskelsyke for Marte Heimli’s project: Karakterisering av immunreseptorer på B-Celler for å forutsi utfall av tymektomi hos pasienter med Myastenia gravis. Innvilget prosjektstøtte fra Forskningsfondet og Erik Allums legat 2025 - Foreningen for Muskelsyke
The project "Kartlegging av cellenettverk i Myasthenia Gravis tymus med betydning for sykdomsutvikling og behandlingsrespons " received funding from UNIFOR and Anders Jahre.
December 2024:
Donia Jamal Ramadan recieves Talentstipend from Sparebanken 1, Ringerike.
Link: Fra Bioingeniør til forskningstalent med store ambisjoner (viheier.no)
May 2024:
Benedicte A. Lie presented our work on extracellular vesicles in rheumatoid arthritis on the annual NOR-EV meeting.
April 2024:
Marte Viken and Øyvind Bakke presented their work at the REMEDY young researcher seminar.
March, 2024:
Fatima Heinicke receives REMEDY Young Research Grant and present her study on molecular changes in CD19+ B-cell subsets at single cell resolution related to disease flare in rheumatoid arthritis patients.
October, 2023:
PhD student Maria Vigeland is interviewed by Morgenbladet about her findings of biological differences regarding development of pain in women vs men.
Link to article (morgenbladet.no)
Marte Viken is interviewed in Drammens Tidene regarding ME research.
Link to article (dt.no)
Fatima Heinicke interviewed regarding her study that compared the performance commercially available library preparation kits for miRNA sequencing.
Link to article (nature.com)
March, 2023:
PhD student Maria Vigeland receives REMEDY Young Research Grant and presents her study on changes in gene expression associated with pain and disability in patients with low back pain and modic changes.
May, 2022:
Our research group is a member of the newly established Center for treatment of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Diseases (REMEDY).
REMEDY Research Centre (remedy-senter.no)
March, 2022
Marte Viken interviewed by www.forskning.no about ME/CFS:
Link to article (forskning.no)
December, 2021:
PhD student Marte Heimli explains to the general audience why T cells need to go to school in the thymus before they can enter the periphery:
Immunceller må gå på skolen - Det medisinske fakultet (uio.no)
September, 2020:
Marte Viken interviewed by VG regarding ME and corona pandemic:
Link to article (vg.no)
March, 2020:
Asgeir Lande communicates his findings from his PhD work regarding HLA associations in ME/CFS to the ME patient organization:
Link to article (me-foreningen.no)
January, 2019:
Blog post on OUS blog “Nobody has a perfect genome” by Benedicte Lie.
Ingen har perfekt arvestoff (wordpress.com)
2018:
Formidling til pasienter og pårørende på ME fagdag:
Benedicte Lie: Genetiske studier ac CFS/ME for å undersøke rollen til immunsystemet - YouTube
June, 2018:
Asgeir Lande interviewed by Fædrelandsvennen regarding ME:
Link to article (fyn.no)
June, 2017:
Media attention when we received funding to our ME research from the program BEHOV-ME from the Norwegian Research Council
Regjeringen gir 30 millioner til Me-forskning: - Det tok fire år før jeg fikk diagnosen (tv2.no)
30 millioner kroner til ME-forskning - Institutt for klinisk medisin (uio.no)
October, 2016:
Pasientnær forskning - Helse Sør-Øst RHF (helse-sorost.no)
September, 2016:
Interviewed by R-magasinet (The Norwegian Rheumatic Association patient organization) about epigenetics and our research in rheumatoid arthritis:
View magazine (open as PDF)
