Human Papillomavirus

Biography

Joakim Dillner is professor in Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Director of the BioBanking & Molecular Resource Infrastructure of Sweden (www.bbmri.se) at Karolinska Institutet. Stockholm, Sweden. He is Head of the Cervical Cancer Prevention Center at the Karolinska Hospital Laboratory and Director of the Swedish National Cervical Screening Registry. He is also responsible for the International Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Reference Center that receives and resequences new isolates of HPV and assigns the unique type numbers for new HPV types. In 2013, he started NIASC, the Nordic Center of Excellence in eScience, that is exploiting eScience for improved cancer screening programs (www.nordicehealth.se). He received the WHO/ International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) Senior Visiting Scientist Award for 2011-2012. He supervises several large trials of HPV screening and registry-based follow-up studies of HPV vaccination and has experience in running international networking efforts for large-scale molecular epidemiological studies. In particular, he has led several large EU consortia on infections and cancer, notably ERICBSB (Evaluation of Risk of Infections in Cancer using Biological Specimen Banks) and VIRASKIN (Viruses and skin cancer risk) in FP5 and CCPRB (Cancer Control using Population-based Registries and Biobanks) in FP6. He is PI of Swedescreen, the first started randomised trial of HPV-screening (since 1997) and was PI of the WHO HPV LabNet Global Reference Laboratory (GRL; 2006-2011).During 2002-2007, he led the Swedish National Biobanking Program (www.biobanks.se). Joakim Dillner´s research group is specializing in high-throughput molecular epidemiological studies that utilize registries and biobanks to identify epidemiologically valid study bases with samples for molecular analyses. Key methods used include mass spectrometry, Luminex and metagenomic sequencing.

Research Interest

BioBanking, HPV, Epidemology, Cancer research, Vaccines, Infectious Diseases