Susanna Brighenti

Susanna Brighenti is an Associate Professor in Immunology at the Center for Infectious Medicine (CIM) at Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research group study immunopathogenesis in human tuberculosis (TB) infection with the aim to develop new host-directed therapies for difficult-to-treat TB disease such as multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB).

Dr. Brighenti performed her PhD training at Lund University and Active Biotech Research (1997-2002) before she was recruited to Karolinska Institutet as a postdoctoral fellow (2003-2008). Since 2008, Dr. Brighenti is one out of 15 group leaders at CIM, which is part of a new research environment, ANA Futura at KI Campus Flemingsberg, with shared infrastructure and cooperation for translational research and education and in close interaction with the Karolinska University hospital.

Dr. Brighenti´s group uses a combination of clinical and translational studies of immune responses in TB patients and including assessment of samples from peripheral blood, fluids and tissue samples, and in vitro studies of immune responses in TB using a macrophage infection model and different Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains. The group has extensive collaborations with TB-endemic countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh, where some of the key concepts for host-directed therapies have been tested in randomized clinical trials.