The Astrup Prize 2020: Proteomes, thyroid hormones in pregnancy and Alzheimer diagnosing

The Astrup Prize competition was held under special conditions this year, as you can read elsewhere in this issue. Despite hurdles from a global pandemic, we found a good way of keeping the tradition with an Astrup Prize competition every second year – and luckily enough: Siemens Healthineers decided to continue sponsoring of the prizes – thank you very much for that.

This year we received eight abstracts to be considered by the Astrup Committee for the competition. And frankly: they could all be winners! The level was very high, nevertheless, only three abstracts were chosen for oral presentation by the committee, consisting of Terho Lehtimaki, Finland, Anne-Lise B. Monsen, Norway, Isleifur Olafsson, Iceland, Anders Olof Larsson, Sweden and Lars Melholt Rasmussen, Denmark. The oral presentations was held online, and can now be found on the NFKK website. Nicolai Wewer Albrechtsen won the third prize. He is a young scientist from Copenhagen, who has already gained a remarkable record working with clinical proteomics. Nicolai presented a robust, high-throughput mass-spectrometry based approach for plasma proteomics. This methodology was applied to samples from patients with fatty liver disease and potential biomarker candidates were identified.

Stine Linding Andersen won the second prize. She is working in Aalborg and Viborg, and has tirelessly in an impressive way focused on issues about thyroid function and diseases for several years. She presented studies, which shed light on a difficult question about putative influences of maternal thyroid function and the use of antithyroid medication on the occurrence of birth defects. Her studies suggest that medication have effects, but that the thyroid function per se does not.

Det här är ett utplock av en intressant artikel från KBN – Nr. 4 – vol. 32 – 2020.