Principal investigator
Eduardo Villablanca
Mucosal immunology and intestinal tissue regeneration.
Villablanca is Professor of Gastrointestinal Immunology at Karolinska Institutet, working at the interface of systems immunology, developmental biology and spatial biology on what keeps the gut in balance and what happens when that balance fails.
His group mapped the murine colon through the full course of inflammation and healing, revealing previously unrecognised roles for B cells (Immunity 2022; Immunity 2026) and the pathways that connect tissue repair to tumorigenesis, including how the liver X receptor can uncouple intestinal regeneration from tumour risk (Nature 2025), a distinction that matters for anyone trying to promote healing without promoting cancer.
To do that the group built its own methods, including a versatile tissue-rolling technique that brings the entire murine gastrointestinal tract into a single spatial-omics analysis.
He trained first as a developmental biologist studying cell migration in zebrafish, then as an immunologist during doctoral studies at San Raffaele University in Milan, followed by postdoctoral work with Rodrigo Mora at Massachusetts General Hospital on intestinal leukocyte trafficking. He was recruited from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute to Karolinska Institutet in 2014. He is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow and holds an ERC Synergy Grant.