Peter Haahr

“Through my research, I hope to be able to place some of the missing pieces in the big puzzle of how our cells detect and react to various types of stress,” says Peter Haahr, PhD in molecular biomedicine and associate professor at the Center for Gene Expression (CGEN), University of Copenhagen (UCPH).

Peter Haar, 36, is one of the five exceptionally talented early-career researchers to receive the 2024 Lundbeck Foundation Fellowship worth a total of DKK 10 million (EUR 1.3). The fellowship grant will be disbursed over the next five years and enables Haahr to set up his own research team at CGEN, UCPH.

The processes underlying cell stress that Haahr and his research-team colleagues will be investigating concern how human cells at molecular level deal with various disruptions, stress-induced damage and threats such as chemical substances in the cell environment or UV radiation from the sun.

When cells become damaged or stressed, they react by reprogramming their gene expression in order to adapt to the new situation and thereby survive. Or, at worst, initiate a process that results in cell death,” Haahr explains:

“This reprogramming is driven by a ‘machinery’ that receives warnings about potential dangers from a number of highly specialised proteins, which thereby also control the process. But if these mechanisms are off-balance, they can cause problems in the form of serious disease. In my research team, our aim is to learn more about how this system works when human cells are exposed to stressors. By gaining new insights into this, we may also gain a better understanding of disease mechanisms and, potentially, ideas for developing novel cancer therapies,” says Haahr.

The research project involves a large array of experiments on human cells, including genetically modified cancer cells. By using a new technology that introduces different genetic mutations into millions of cells at a time, while measuring the impact of these mutations on cellular stress response, the researchers hope to gain a clearer picture of the workings of this ‘machinery’.  and of the specific genes involved.

“We use cancer cells in many of these experiments partly because they are easy to work with,” says Haahr, adding: 

“But also because cancer cells are some of the most stressed cells that occur in the human body. Many cancer cells depend on the defences that protect our cells against stress for their uncontrolled replication. A better understanding of those mechanisms could potentially lead to the development of new cancer therapies.”