Lena Eliasson is Professor in Experimental Diabetes Research at Lund University, Sweden and her research group works in association with Lund University Diabetes Centre (LUDC) and EXODIAB. She received an MSc in engineering physics from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1992 and was awarded a PhD in cellular physiology from the University of Gothenburg in 1997, before completing postdoctoral studies at Lund University.
Her expertise is within the field of type 2 diabetes and cystic fibrosis-related diabetes and the control of insulin and glucagon secretion. Her research focus is to understand how to circumvent the reduced capacity of the pancreatic beta cells to secrete enough insulin, and why the control of alpha cell glucagon secretion becomes disturbed in diabetes. She has used the patch-clamp technique to investigate ion-channels and exocytosis in pancreatic alpha- and beta-cells. More recently, she combines this with the examination of miRNA networks important in the regulation of insulin secretion. Her research aims to understand cellular mechanisms underlying impaired islet hormone secretion contributing to the pathogenesis of diabetes.
She is research group leader for the Islet Cell Exocytosis unit in the Department of Clinical Sciences in LUDC Malmö. In her role at LUDC, formed through a Swedish Research Council Linnaeus grant over 10 years ago, she collaborates with colleagues to perform functional follow-ups of both epigenetic and genetic observations from humans. These studies aim to increase the understanding of insulin- and glucagon secretion in the complex disease diabetes.
Duality of Interest: None declared
Date: Spring 2023