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Ecological and healthy dog food from abattoir by-products

Text: Antti Kivimäki
Photos: Anna Bui

– In the past, some of the by-products were supplied to fur farms and the rest to pet-food producers. With fur farming continuously declining, it is worth considering how the products could be more effectively put to use elsewhere, Salin says.

It is a simple idea but one which requires plenty of fine-tuning

New recipes are tested on pet dogs. Testing is used to examine the effects of diverse protein sources and gentle cooking on a dog’s ability to absorb the protein. The aim is to create a product that leads to optimal protein absorption, which then reduces environmental nitrogen pollution.

Vitamins and fibre are added to make a complete meal that provides all the nutrients needed by dogs.

– An actual raw food diet requires a lot of knowledge. For my own dog I keep a careful spreadsheet to ensure he receives all the necessary nutrients, vitamins, minerals and micronutrients, Salin explains.

Siru Salin ja Chesapeakelahdennoutaja Dante

Siru Salin and 13-weeks old Chesapeake Bay Retriever Dante.

– Many dog owners lack the time and competence required for this. Nor does defrosted raw food keep very long. With this new, gently cooked product selection, Snellman is looking to expand its clientele to dog owners who want feeding their dog to be a little easier.”

Salin’s journey to become a postdoctoral researcher has been unusual. After upper secondary school, she completed a Bachelor’s degree in business administration and worked as managing director and account manager of a sound design company, as well as running a riding school.

A love for animals and interest in dogs held since childhood brought Salin to the University of Helsinki to study animal sciences as a mature student in the early 2000s. While studying, she was an entrepreneur in the real estate business with her husband.

In her doctoral thesis, completed in 2020, Salin explored the effects of feed with an excessive energy content on insulin resistance, excess weight and metabolic disorders in dairy cows.  

– As such, insulin resistance and weight-gain mechanisms seem to work in similar ways in many mammals, including dogs, cows and humans.

Even before completing her PhD, Salin was a member of the DogRisk Research Group of the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. There she edited and analysed a large body of survey data related to Finnish dog-owners, looking for links between canine diets and diverse illnesses.

At dietary seminars in Finland, Salin met Magnus Pettersson, Business Director of Snellman Petfood.

– I was very active in contacting him and sharing my research ideas concerning the enhanced utilisation of the raw material by-products of human food production. We both agreed that there hadn’t been much academic research on canine nutrition in Finland, and that raw feeding and gently cooked products had been studied very little areound the world, Salin explains.

After a few meetings, Petterson was convinced by Salin’s idea, and Salin soon made a PoDoCo application.

The idea behind the PoDoCo (PostDocs in Companies) grant is to open channels for recent doctoral graduates to enter careers in companies. A PoDoCo project lasts for one or two years, with funding from foundations being provided for six or twelve months, followed by a matching period of employment with the partnering company.

Salin made a two-year contract with Snellman and is now a team member taking part in pet food product development.

– In these grant applications, it’s really important to be proactive. If you believe in your mission and agenda, it’s easy to convince others, but a suitable partner won’t just fall out of the sky: you have to have the courage to seek them out.

Salin points out that there are many pet food enterprises in Finland that would not have the resources to carry out scientific research to support their product development. If small companies were to get together as a consortium or cooperative, they might be able to employ a postdoctoral researcher via the PoDoCo system, for example.

Siru Salin, postdoctoral researcher in domestic animal nutrition, received a PoDoCo grant in 2021 to to explore whether the secondary abattoir products could be more effectively utilised in formulating a new dog food product.

Funding from Cultural Foundation to make more world literature available in Finnish

Less and less high-quality contemporary world literature is published in Finnish. Relatively many translations are made of English-language works, but very few from other languages. The accessibility of Finnish translations of high-quality world literature has been reduced and the available offering is narrow.

– From the perspective of Finnish literature and culture, it is essential that Finnish readers breathe the same air as the rest of the world. We must have access to the cutting edge of international literature, especially in a way that offers us a native-level understanding of the text. Only then can we consider ourselves the world’s best readers and create world-class literature of our own, states author Karo Hämäläinen, a member of the Finnish Cultural Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

Publishers will be able to apply for the new grant for the first time in the foundation’s March 2022 round of applications, after which it will repeat on an annual basis. The size of the grant will be EUR 5,000–15,000 per work to be translated. The sum total of the Cultural Foundation’s new funding for translating and publishing world literature will be one million euros.

Publishers must identify the works to be translated themselves; they are instructed, however, particularly to seek works from cultures outside of the mainstream Anglosphere. African or Asian literature written directly in English, however, is acceptable.

– We hope that publishers will use the new grant to supplement and enrich their portfolios, and that this will also lead to new opportunities for Finland’s highly skilled translators, Hämäläinen explains.

The grant must always lead to the publication of a printed book; audiobooks are an additional option for the publisher to consider. Applicants must justify the choice of work based not only on its quality but also on the interests of the greater culture-loving public.

The Finnish Cultural Foundation has extensively supported reading in Finland in recent years. The Reading Gifts for Children project has dealt out book bags to all babies born in Finland between 2019 and 2021, with the help of maternity clinics. Meanwhile, more than 200,000 books have been distributed to elementary school libraries in Finland thanks to the Reading Clan projects.

Milk – crucial source of nutrients or threat to children’s health?

Runsaan maitovalmisteiden käytön todettiin olevan yhteydessä kohonneeseen tyypin 1 diabeteksen kehittymiseen. Kuva: Laura Iisalo

Text and photos: Laura Iisalo

The occurrence of type 1 diabetes has multiplied in Finland since the 1950’s, and excessive consumption of cow’s milk has been found to predispose individuals to the development of the disease.

Doctoral candidate at the University of Helsinki’s Doctoral Programme in Population Health, Katariina Koivusaari, has spent the past three and half years looking into the connection between the processing of milk and the development of type 1 diabetes in children. The possible link to asthma was included in the research later on.

– Cow’s milk is a source of protein, nutrients, and vitamins for children, including calcium, iodine, vitamin D, and some types of vitamin B, and milk products are very popular. On the other hand, the occurrence of type 1 diabetes is the highest in the world, which is why doing this research in Finland makes sense, Koivusaari says.

Prior to her thesis Koivusaari completed her master studies, and classified all milk-containing food products in the National Food Composition Database according to how they were heat-treated and homogenised during processing. 

In high pasteurisation the heat inactivates proteins in the milk, and in high-temperature treatment new compounds are also created. In homogenisation, the fat in milk is broken into smaller compounds, which changes the surface structure. This can, according to Koivusaari, affect the structure of the proteins attached to the fat. 

Apart from different types of commercial drinkable milk, the classification included quark, cheese, yoghurt, and other milk products. Extra attention was paid to children’s foods including formulas, porridges, and baby food products containing cow’s milk.

– Milk is a very complex matter and in previous research it has been left unclear what is the exact factor in milk that increases the risk of developing the illness. Understanding this would mean that it could be taken into consideration in processing, says Koivusaari.

High-temperature treatment is connected to asthma

Katariina Koivusaarelle myönnettiin vuonna 2018 keskusrahastosta 24 000 euron apuraha maidon prosessoinnin yhteyttä lasten tyypin 1 diabetekseen tutkivaan väitöskirjatyöhön. Kuva: Laura Iisalo

Koivusaari performed her thesis work at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare. She made use of the research material collected since 1996 as part of the Finnish study, Type 1 Diabetes Prediction and Prevention, which according to Koivusaari, is one of the most important studies in the field.

Statistical analysis was prepared by a doctoral candidate at Tampere University, Essi Syrjälä and the research project was supervised by Tapani Alatossava at the University of Helsinki and Suvi Virtanen and Sari Niinistö at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare.

The study didn’t find any of the processing methods to be a significant marker but excessive consumption of milk products was connected to a higher risk of developing type 1 diabetes.

High-temperature treated milk products, which include infant formulas, seem to be linked to a higher asthma risk. This is the first study in which such connection has been found.

The study results are promising, yet more research is needed in order to verify the outcome. Koivusaari intends to defend her thesis by the end of this year, and after that she is going to embark on a new study that once again relates to children and food.

– The subject is always relevant because eating is mandatory. I find it meaningful to link the knowledge in my study field to children – for me that is important and interesting, she says.

Doctoral candidate Katariina Koivusaari, was awarded a grant worth 24 000 euros in 2018 from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. She studied the connection of milk processing and the outbreak of type 1 diabetes and asthma in children.

The August Round of Applications has started

The purpose of the mobility grant is to enable artists and critics to spend time abroad to discover new tools and networks that support their art practise. Individual artist, critics, working groups as well as registered organisations such as associations from any field of art are eligible to apply for a Mobility grant.

Mobility grants may be sought for expenses ranging from EUR 2,000 to EUR 10,000. Acceptable uses of the grant include e.g. residency costs, participation in a festival, exhibition project or international collaboration. It is not possible to apply for both a working grant and an expenditure grant in the same application; working must be funded by other means. Even though travelling is still restricted in many ways, grants are worth applying for, as the rules for using the grants are flexible.

The Cultural Foundation is favourably disposed towards higher travel costs due to the journey taking place in a way that pollutes the climate and the environment as little as possible. In addition to direct travel costs, the grant may also be used to offset emissions that your form of travel produces.

The COVID-19 situation presents some changes to the residency program of the Foundation. There are two brand new residencies open for application, Fabrikken Art Center in Copenhagen and NART in Estonia. They both offer two three-month working grants. For Triangle residency in New York the Finnish Cultural Foundation offers one working grant for three months. All three programs are targeted at visual artists.

In the August Round of Applications, you may apply either for a residency offered by the Finnish Cultural Foundation or for a mobility grant, not both.

More information on August Round is available here.

Finnish coronavirus vaccine developer Rokote Laboratories Finland secures significant funding

Ferring Ventures SA, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation have made a capital investment of 3.5 million euros in Rokote Laboratories Finland. In addition, Business Finland has granted a 5.5-million-euro loan to the company to support further development and clinical trials of the company’s coronavirus vaccine.

– Thanks to the funding we’ve secured now, we’ll be able to move forward in launching manufacture of the FINCoVac vaccine candidate, and we’ll be able to complete phase I and phase II clinical trials, Mr Pasi Kemppainen from Rokote Laboratories Ltd. says.

The funded coronavirus vaccine is based on research carried out at the University of Helsinki and the University of Eastern Finland, namely in the laboratories of Professor of Virology Kalle Saksela, Academician Kari Alitalo, and Academy Professor Seppo Ylä-Herttuala. This research has been supported by the Academy of Finland, the Wihuri Research Institute, and the Sakari Alhopuro Foundation. Both universities are also shareholders in the company.  

The vaccine is based on gene transfer technology developed by Ylä-Herttuala’s research group, and the technology has already been successfully used in several clinical trials using gene therapy to treat cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

– The vaccine uses a safe adenovirus carrier that contains a cloned DNA strand of the SARS-Cov-2 virus’s S protein. This can be used to program nasopharyngeal cells to produce the surface protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which, in turn, produces a response to the vaccine. There are no other parts of the virus in the vaccine, Ylä-Herttuala says.

Easily modifiable vaccine helps to tackle virus mutations

The genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is expected to continue mutating rapidly.

– With the vaccine we are developing now, we seek to tackle the challenge posed by new virus mutations. In the future, the vaccine can serve as an easy-to-administer booster for those who have already received a traditional vaccine, Saksela says.

Later on, the same method can also be used to develop vaccines against other viruses.

– The work carried out by Rokote Laboratories Finland Ltd. will make the use of a novel vaccine technology established here in Finland. This technology will also make us better prepared for possible future pandemics, Saksela points out.

For further information, please contact:

  • Academy Professor Seppo Ylä-Herttuala, University of Eastern Finland, tel. +358 40 355 2075, seppo.ylaherttuala(at)uef.fi
  • Professor Kalle Saksela, University of Helsinki, tel. +358 29 412 6770, kalle.saksela(at)helsinki.fi
  • Pasi Kemppainen, Rokote Laboratories Finland Oy, pasi(at)rokote.com

Regional Funds pay out 15 million in grants

In the January round of applications, the foundation’s 17 regional funds received more than ten thousand applications. The number grew particularly in the regions of Uusimaa, Pirkanmaa and Southwest Finland (Varsinais-Suomi).

– In Uusimaa, we received approximately 600 more applications for working grants than last year. The cultural field is experiencing difficulties overall, but the situation has been especially worrying for freelancers this spring, explains Jari Sokka, Chairman of the foundation’s Board of Trustees.

The board responded to these circumstances by releasing a third batch of additional funding worth EUR 2 million. It was channelled to freelance artists in the form of full-year and half-year grants awarded by the regional funds. So far, the Cultural Foundation’s support of the arts and academic disciplines in the ongoing financial period has totalled around EUR 50 million.

Wishes of donors are evident

This spring, the regional funds awarded 204 full-year and 291 half-year grants. There were 818 grants for the arts and 345 for academic disciplines. The grants went to nearly 200 different municipalities, and around 12% of applicants were successful.

– The regional funds’ opportunities for giving out grants depend on the donations they receive. For example, the South Ostrobothnia fund is now paying out over EUR 1.1 million, of which the Viljo Syrenius Fund accounts for as much as one fifth, says the foundation’s Secretary General, Antti Arjava.

The distribution of the regional funds’ grants varies significantly. In North Savo, nearly 50% of grants go to medical sciences, due to the stated aims of its donor funds, whereas in Kainuu, the arts make up over 70%. The Lapland Regional Fund strongly supports research on Arctic regions and the Sámi culture, while the focus of the North Karelia fund is on supporting young people’s academic postgraduate studies.

With the grants paid out this spring by the regional funds, the current value of the funding provided by the Finnish Cultural Foundation since 1939 has exceeded EUR 1 billion.

– Over 80 years ago, the Cultural Foundation’s assets were raised by elementary school children. Nearly 200,000 Finns, ranging from farmers and blue-collar workers to government officials, factory managers and professors, took part in the fundraising. Indisputably, that fundraising drive has had a major impact on Finnish academia and arts, throughout the country, Arjava states.

On the Road with the Finnish Cultural Foundation

This year, the Cultural Foundation’s regional funds will hold a joint virtual award ceremony. The premiere of “On the Road with the Finnish Cultural Foundation” will take place at 6 pm on 26 May. Invited are grantees from various years, representing every region. During the two-hour online ceremony, journalist Kimmo Ohtonen, some of the foundation’s grantees and other interesting guests will discuss regional heritage in our global world, as well as the secrets and power of creativity. For more information, please visit the On the Road with the Finnish Cultural Foundation web page.

Would you like a boxful of performing arts?

Every now again there is a public debate about the role and duty of the arts. This is a good thing and the subject should be discussed even more often, believes curator Eva Neklyaeva, who likes to experiment with her work to find out what effect art can have on the community, culture, politics, and peoples’ lives.

She is especially curious about forming a meaningful connection between art and the audience. Due to the COVID pandemic, this connection has been broken for almost one and half years, which has jeopardised the income of many artists, and made Neklyaeva come up with new types of solutions to the difficult situation.

“If we make space for art, then we as a society take a stand in what we believe in.”

– My curatorial thinking starts with a need, and all performing artists that I know have been left without work and opportunities to meet with an audience. We need new and different forms of art, says the former director of the Santarcangelo Festival, Baltic Circle Festival, and the non-profit Checkpoint Helsinki art organisation.

What Neklyaeva is most concerned about is that art and culture are not considered basic services. For her it is difficult to understand why shops are allowed to stay open but museums are forced to keep their doors shut.

– Human relations, love, and nature bring meaning to our lives, and art and culture are definitely on that list. These things cannot be defined by their financial value but if we make space for art, then we as a society take a stand on what we believe in, Neklyaeva says.

The need for new art forms is permanent

Taiteellinen kolmikko Eva Neklyaeva, Marvo Cendroni ja Lisa Gilardino.

The artistic trio Eva Neklyaeva, Marvo Cendroni ja Lisa Gilardino.

The solution to an exceptional situation was eventually formed with two colleagues,Lisa Gilardino and Marco Cendroni. The trio invited artists that they had worked with before to create a way to pack a performance in a box, and then post it to the audience.

The project was named Samara Editions, which refers to a double-winged fruit of a maple tree, which floats from the tree to the ground with the wind. The first show was produced with Italian choreographer Chiara Bersani but Neklyaeva doesn’t want to talk about its content too much – a big part of the charm is the excitement of the unpacking experience.

– In her performance Chiara talks about how there are a lot of heavy things going on right now, and we have very little opportunity to process the feelings caused by these events. We cannot even take part in events like funerals and weddings that normally allow us to feel sadness or joy. She intends to give the audience instruments that can be used to create new types of rituals at home, says Neklyaeva.

The Samara Editions artworks can be purchased online and almost 700 boxes have been sent all over the world already. The project was also shown to the audience of the Oslo International Theatre Festival, and it will be part of the Spring Festival in Utrecht, in The Netherlands, in May. The next part of the series is currently under construction with the Finnish artist Jenna Sutela.

Even though the concept was born in the middle of the COVID crisis, Neklyaeva hopes that it doesn’t stop there. She says that the need for new art forms is permanent. It is not possible for everyone – for financial or other reasons – to fly to Europe to go on a tour, and even if they could, it wouldn’t be sustainable. For the artists involved the project provides an opportunity to examine their works from a new perspective.

– I hope that there would be more space for experimenting and playfulness in general, and that art wouldn’t be an exceptional experience but a part of everyday life, Neklyaeva says.

Curator Eva Neklyaeva received a 15 000 euros grant in 2021 for her Softshell project that sends art into people’s homes.

The future of treating diseases lies in immunology

Text and photos: Laura Iisalo

Tutkijatohtori Zivile Giedraitytelle myönnettiin säätiöiden post doc -poolin apuraha

Zivile Giedraityte working in her lab.

The cost of cancer is high for both the patient and society, and the same applies for autoimmunity, a condition where the patient develops antibodies or T cells, which are a type of immune cell, that mistakenly react to the patient’s own tissues or organs. 

Both diseases cause remarkable morbidity and mortality, even with current treatment methods. The two are also strongly connected. Cancer is often caused by a faulty immune system, which fails to attack defective cells thus allowing cancerous cells to grow and divide.

Chemotherapy is frequently used to treat cancerous tumours but Postdoctoral researcher Zivile Giedraityte believes that in the future all diseases, including cancer, will be treated with immunotherapy instead. 

The method, which came of age in the early 2000’s, involves activating the patient’s own immune system to cure a tumour by identifying and destroying cancer cells. By now 25 percent of cancers have been cured this way but strengthening the immune system comes with a risk; it may cause the patient to develop autoimmunity. 

– I believe that all diseases are linked to immune responses. In the future treatment will be highly personalised and I believe that we will be able to find an immune response that is so powerful that it will kill the cancer cells in our bodies. To do that we need to understand the defence mechanisms, and to control the immune reaction. The more we understand, the more control we have of those diseases, Giedraityte says.

Discovery is the joy of science

Professori Shiv Pillai. Kuva: HMX

Professor Shiv Pillai. Photo: HMX

Giedraityte, who is currently developing new types of immunotherapies for ovarian cancer at the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology, Translational Immunology Research Program, University of Helsinki, wants to eventually become an independent researcher, and better understand the mechanisms that affect the immune system in order to find new ways to cure cancer. 

To take the next step towards her goals she will spend one year at the laboratory run by Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences & Technology at Harvard Medical School, Shiv Pillai, in the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, where everything is studied through the lens of immunology.

– Our immune systems have been designed to see an infinite number of shapes, and they can recognise anything that is foreign. Sometimes they make cells that recognise our own cells, and that is the price we pay for having strong mechanisms that protect us from infections, Pillai explains the mechanism of autoimmunity.

According to him there is no better suited environment for scientific research than Boston, which is one of the most international cities with students and postdoctoral researchers from all over the world, and where science is better funded than in any European country.

– I arrived here 37 years ago and I still feel like there is no other place in the world that gives more scientific stimulation. We have a friendly atmosphere in our lab and we like to bounce ideas off each other. I’m still learning every day, Pillai says.

The scientific community is also highly competitive, and the key to a successful launch of a career as an independent researcher is making a discovery. It is what Pillai did in the 1980’s, when he discovered the existence and importance of surrogate light chains for B cell development, and it is what he encourages his students to do.

– The joy of science is discovery and the beauty in studying biology is that we understand many things but not completely. In order to use the knowledge for therapeutic advantage we need to understand better how things work, and that is what we try to do.

Postdoctoral researcher Zivile Giedraityte was awarded a grant in 2021 from the Foundation’s Post Doc Pool which allows her to spend an academic year at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard.

The results from the Säätiöiden post doc –pooli’s spring application round – increasing number of applicants

Altogether 133 post-doctoral scholars from around Finland took part in the spring application round. Thus a grant could be awarded to 22 % of the applicants. The number of applications increased by 13 percent from the previous year. You can find all the Cultural Foundation’s Post Doc pool grantees here. Choose Post doc pooli from “Erillishaut” section.

Säätiöiden post doc -pooli has proven to be an important instrument of research funding which has enabled young scholars with families to finance research periods at top universities abroad. The grants awarded by the Pool are determined flexibly in accordance with the applicant’s needs and they often include their family’s moving expenses and children’s day care or school fees.

The Pool has a role in making Finnish research more international. After twenty-three application rounds over 630 scholars have already received funding through the Pool for at least a one-year research period abroad. One third of the grantees have received a two-year funding.

The Pool’s next application round will take place from 15 August until 15 September 2021, when some 1.7 million euro will be given in grants. The results of this round will be published by December 2021.

Teachers develop their teaching and learning skills also in distressed situations

Tahani Aldahdouh arrived Finland 7 years ago as a grant researcher to pursue her doctoral study in Education at Tampere University. She defended her dissertation in 2020 after which she worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the digitalization in higher education project. Her work started just on the same time as COVID-19 has become a global pandemic. The focus of her research was to investigate how university teachers in Finland manage to develop their online teaching expertise during this tough period.  

– While conducting the research, I realized how COVID-19 has troubled Finnish universities even though they have already prepared plans for digitalization. Finnish universities have invested a great of their efforts and resources to support teachers with all technical and pedagogical solutions to smoothen their transition to digital teaching. Even though, we have some scientific evidences that university teachers have stumbled with difficulties related, for example, to fostering their students’ engagement, and working at home with children. Please note that we are talking about a context where teachers are enjoying all that supports and capabilities; that kept me wondering, how can ever teachers living in a context lacks even the basic needs of life survive in such harsh situation, Aldahdouh wonders.

The idea sprang from the fact that she have lived the both contexts. Before coming to Finland, she was a teacher in one of the stricken and distressed areas in the world, Gaza city in Palestine. Gaza has been subject to several wars, long-lasting and drastic blockades, and has experienced a severe electricity and fuel crisis. The poverty and unemployment rate are among the highest records in the world. All of these factors have resulted in hundreds of casualties and also have hurt the physical and functioning capacity of all higher education institutions in Gaza. 

– What is surprising is that despite all these challenges, scientific evidences indicated that higher education continues at deprived contexts. But how? Thus, in this mobility period, I want to extend the topic of online teaching expertise running at Tampere University to conduct a comparative study between two highly variant contexts. I am heading to the Islamic University of Gaza in Jan 2022 to closely interact with teachers there and investigate how teachers manage to learn and develop their online teaching expertise.  

The Pool’s next application round will take place from 15 August until 15 September 2021, when some 1.7 million euro will be given in grants. The results of this round will be published by December 2021.

The Säätiöiden post doc -pooli was set up in the autumn of 2009. During the fourth three-year-period 2019-2021 there are thirteen foundations involved, allocating altogether 3.2 million euro annually to the pool. The Pool’s foundations are Emil Aaltonen’s Foundation, Alfred Kordelin Foundation, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Paulo Foundation, Päivikki and Sakari Sohlberg Foundation, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Finnish Cultural Foundation, the Finnish Medical Foundation, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland, the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland, Finnish Foundation for Technology Promotion, Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and the Ulla Tuominen’s Foundation.

Further information:

www.postdocpooli.fi, info(at)postdocpooli.fi or from coordinator Mikko-Olavi Seppälä, tel. + 358 400 868 006