Johan Henriksson

Johan Henriksson is Associate Professor at Umeå University, Sweden, where he leads the Johan Henriksson Group within the Department of Molecular Biology and the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), a node of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine. He is also affiliated with UCMR (Umeå Centre for Microbial Research) and IceLab (Integrated Science Lab), emphasising cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Research in a nutshell. Henriksson’s team explores how T cells function in health and disease, with a special emphasis on cancer and CAR T-cell immunotherapy. By integrating single-cell multi-omics, pooled CRISPR screens, synthetic biology, and machine learning, the group maps gene-regulatory networks that control T-cell identity and anti-tumour activity. They develop wet-lab protocols (e.g., molecular inversion probes for unbiased quantification) and open-source computational tools—including the Nando framework for gene-expression prediction and high-performance pipelines written in Rust—to extract robust biological knowledge from very large datasets.

Major research directions.

• Discovery of a novel JUNB⁺ CD4 T-cell state linked to memory formation, circadian rhythm, and CAR T-cell exhaustion.
• Single-cell telomere measurements for early cancer detection, particularly pancreatic cancer.
• Pooled CRISPR screening in primary human T cells and in Plasmodium falciparum to uncover essential regulators.
• Extension of single-cell technologies to microbial systems in collaboration with Laura Carroll, Kemal Avican, and Linas Mažutis.
• Development of the Bascet/Zorn pipeline for reference-free comparative genomics across mixed microbial communities.
• Advocacy and engineering of the Rust programming language for safe, high-performance bioinformatics.

Collaborative network. Henriksson actively collaborates with experts who contribute complementary biological insight: Isabelle Magalhães (CAR T-cell therapy), Nicole Boucheron (T cells in allergic asthma), Mattias Forsell (B-cell responses), Anna Överby (tick-borne encephalitis), Annasara Lenman (SARS-CoV-2), Tommy Löfstedt (machine-learning latent-space models), Ellen Bushell (Plasmodium gene essentiality), and many others.

Training & mentorship. The group currently hosts PhD students (e.g., Ionut Sebastian Mihai) and welcomes additional students and postdocs interested in combining wet-lab immunology with computational innovation, especially those eager to adopt Rust for large-scale data analysis.