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Levent Akyürek

Professor/ Chief Physician

Department of Laboratory Medicine
Telephone
+46 722-00 98 30
Mail
levent.akyurek@gu.se
Visiting address
Bruna stråket 16
41345 Göteborg
Postal address
Sahlgrenska universitetssjukhuset
41345 Göteborg

Professor/ Chief Physician

Department of Laboratory Medicine
Telephone
+46 31-342 10 00
+46 722-00 98 30
Mail
levent.akyurek@gu.se
Visiting address
Bruna stråket 16
41345 Göteborg
Postal address
Sahlgrenska universitetssjukhuset
41345 Göteborg

About Levent Akyürek

Dr. Levent Akyürek is responsible for pulmonary pathology services and serves as a clinical consultant pathologist and cytologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, with expertise in pulmonary and thoracic pathology, molecular pathology, and heart and lung transplantation pathology.

Dr. Akyürek graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Dokuz Eylül University, Turkey, in 1989 and completed his PhD at Uppsala University in 1996. From 1997 to 2002, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Elizabeth G. Nabel at the University of Michigan and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. He was appointed Associate Professor of Cell Biology at the University of Gothenburg in 2004 and Professor of Pathology in 2014. His international academic experience includes sabbatical appointments at the Department of Pathology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in 2023 and at the Department of Pathology, University of Siena, in 2026. He currently serves as a reviewer and editorial board member for several scientific journals in the fields of vascular biology, transplantation immunology, and molecular biology.

His research career has focused on vascular biology, particularly angiogenesis and vascular remodeling in cardiovascular disease and tumor growth. His early work investigated the cellular interactions underlying vasculoproliferative responses in transplant vasculopathy and identified important cellular determinants of neointima formation. He subsequently studied the biology of neointimal smooth muscle and endothelial cells, including mechanisms regulating cellular proliferation and genes involved in cell-cycle control.

His research has further focused on the role of filamins, a family of cytoskeletal proteins, in vascular cell signaling and transcriptional regulation during the progression of cardiovascular and tumor diseases. His laboratory was among the first to generate filamin-deficient mouse models and experimental models to investigate the biological functions of filamins in tumor growth and cardiovascular remodeling.

His current research focuses on pulmonary pathology, including neoplastic lung lesions, pulmonary fibrosis, and lung transplantation pathology. The research combines clinical tissue specimens and cytological material with molecular analyses and image analysis of tissue sections. A particular focus of his research group is the study of histomorphological growth patterns of neoplastic pulmonary epithelial cells and their interactions with stromal and inflammatory cells within the tissue microenvironment.