Board
Pia Siljander, President
Docent Pia R-M Siljander is a principal investigator and a university lecturer in the Molecular and Integrative Biosciences Research Program (MIBS), Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and is also affiliated with Cancer Unit for Research on Experimental Drugs (CURED), Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki, Finland. The research topics of her EV group are the role of EVs in platelet and cancer biology, EVs as biomarkers, and their inherent therapeutic properties. Her interest in the method development and standardization of the EV field is hallmarked by the co-founding of the world’s first EV core facility at the University of Helsinki in 2016.
https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/extracellular-vesicles
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/pia-siljander
Saara Laitinen, Vice President and Treasurer
Saara Laitinen, R&D Manager, runs an interdisciplinary team of scientists in Finnish Red Cross Blood Service having strong expertise in both stem and blood cell biology. Saara has over 10 years of research carrier in EVs and she is one of the pioneers in Finland to study intercellular communication and immunomodulation by EVs. Her team is currently focused in developing isolation, purification and analytical methods especially for blood cell derived EVs. Ultimately the aim is to develop novel therapeutics from blood and up-scalable production processes for clinical grade EVs. Saara is leading the Extracellular Vesicle Ecosystem for Theranostics Platforms (EVE), a national consortium of 13 partners, consisting of both academy and companies aiming for novel EV-based therapies.
bloodservice.fi/eve
Maija Puhka, Social media specialist and Nordic Science Club co-organizer
Maija works as a HiPrep & EV core facility head and research coordinator at FIMM, Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland, University of Helsinki. Her team tackles the growing needs for EV and nucleic acid sample preparations and quality control serving both basic and translational research. The long-term research goals include the development of technologies for EV isolation, quality control and biomarker discovery, including the Next Generation Sequencing -based quest of urinary EV-RNA biomarkers for diabetic kidney disease in the BEAt-DKD project.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/maija-puhka
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/infrastructures/fimm-technology-centre/fimm-hiprep-extracellular-vesicles-core
Tarja Malm, Secretary
The aim of the Neuroinflammation research group is to understand how neuroinflammatory reactions are mediated in neurodegenerative diseases, especially at the level of non-coding RNAs and EVs. We use interdisciplinary approaches and novel, human based models to find novel therapeutic targets for the disease benefit.
https://sites.uef.fi/tarja-malm-group/
Janne Leivo, Nordic Science Club co-organizer and Organizing chairperson for FISEV Annual Meeting 2025
Janne Leivo is a senior research fellow and inFLAMES group leader at the Department of Life Technologies, University of Turku. His research group designs new diagnostic concepts for early cancer detection, by combining biomarker discovery, antibody, and assay development with clinical validation. One of the main goals is to utilize the complex biomolecular information encapsulated by EVs for the development of assays capable of identifying patients with clinically significant cancer as early as possible.
https://earlycancerdiagnostics.utu.fi/
Tapani Viitala, Member Outreach
Tapani Viitala is a professor in Novel Drug Formulations, which is a shared position between Faculty of Pharmacy at University of Helsinki and Pharmaceutical Sciences Laboratory at Åbo Akademi University. He has an extensive background in experimental studies and physico-chemical characterization of surfaces, interfaces, nanoscale layers and particle materials in close connection to material science, biophysics and nanotechnology. He also has ten years’ experience working for a company providing high-tech, precision analytical instruments for nanoscale study of interfaces. After returning to academia in 2010 his research has been focusing on utilizing model surfaces, living cells, nanoscience and –technology, and various physico-chemical real-time and/or label-free characterization techniques to improve the mechanistic understanding of drug and nanoparticle action and delivery.
https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/fi/persons/tapani-viitala
https://research.abo.fi/fi/persons/tapani-viitala
Seppo Vainio
Seppo Vainio is a professor of Developmental biology in University of Oulu, in Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine in Finland and serves now as the scientific director of Kvantum Institute and the vice director the Flagship GeneCellNano. He is a member in two FET OPEN projects on EVs (MindGap and Gladiator). The collective goals of his research team are to identify the genes, signals and molecular pathways associated with organogenesis which offering grounds for novel biosensor solutions. The OMICS platforms, in vivo and ex vivo gene editing, gene knock out, ex vivo organ and organoid culture approaches and time lapse imaging are used for EV based functional analysis and biomarker identification.
https://www.oulu.fi/en/research-groups/developmental-biology-laboratory-organogenesis-extracellular-vesicles
Ramila Mammadova, Nordic Science Club co-organizer
Ramila is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, University of Oulu, Finland. She specializes in isolation, characterization, and engineering of EVs, particularly PDNVs from different plant resources. Her current project focuses on the utilization of berry-derived PDNVs in cosmeceutical formulations for skin tissue regeneration. Among the long-term research objectives are investigating the bioactivity of plant EVs and PDNVs on human health and well-being, and developing a novel class of molecular delivery vectors by loading EVs with various natural or synthetic compounds.
Snehadri Sinha, Web manager
Snehadri is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, and a member of both the Oral Cancer research group and the EV group. His current research focus is on the interactions between mesenchymal stem cells and osteosarcoma. He did his Master’s thesis in the EV group at University of Helsinki, studying the effects of lipoproteins on platelet EVs.
