Research at Oslo University Hospital

Professor Ewan Birney, CBE FRS FMedSci, Deputy Director General, EMBL & Director, EMBL-EBI
European Bioinformatics Institute, EMBL, Cambridge, UK

When: Wednesday, October 19, 1200-1245 + Q&A
Where: Auditorium, Institute for Cancer Research, ground floor, Research Building (K building), Oslo University Hospital - Radium Hospital site

Integreat - The Norwegian centre for knowledge-driven machine learning - has been selected as a new Center of Exellence. Arnoldo Frigessi will head Integreat for the first three years. He is the director of the Oslo Centre for Biostatistics & Epidemiology (OCBE), a joint center integrating the activities of biostatistics departments at the University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital.

The nine new centers appointed by the Norwegian Research Council will each receive NOK 155 million.

In June last year, 36 applicants were invited to further develop their applications. The funding for the nine centers were granted at a meeting on 22 September.  

On September 23rd he Research Council of Norway published the results of the latest Centre of Excellence call.
The PRecision Immunotherapy Alliance (PRIMA) was funded as a CoE with 155 mNOK over 10 years.

The center will have Kalle Malmberg and Johanna Olweus as co-directors and includes their groups and that of June Myklebust (PI) at ICR, and also Ludvig Munthe, Jan Terje Andersen and Fridtjof Lund-Johansen at Department of Immunology and Transfusion Medicine (RH) as well as Emma Haapaniemi (NCMM) as PIs and with UiO as host and OUH as partner.

The Tumour Marker Group at the Department of Medical Biochemistry, OUH-Radiumhospitalet, is part of the European SQUEEZE consortium, which in total receives more than NOK 100 million from the EU through the Horizon Europe 2022 call. 

"We are proud to provide analyses of serum drug and anti-drug antibody concentrations in such a prestigious and ambitious European collaboration", says senior consultant and research group leader Nils Bolstad.

Assistant, associate and full professors, group leaders, clinicians, research coordinators from any public university or hospital from Norway, Sweden and Denmark are invited to sign up for a course on how to increase innovation in your lab and bridge the gap between scientist and health innovator in Trondheim 23–24 November.

The course is arranged by the School of Health Innovation, which was established by the University of Oslo, and aims to provide healthcare and life science researchers with tools and insight into how research can be put to use for the benefit of patients, the healthcare system and our society.

Scientists in the Protonics Group at the Institute of Cancer Research, together with colleagues from NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece, have found that apart from being a photosensitive drug, 5-ALA is also a potent inhibitor of the glycolytic enzyme lactate dehydrogenase (LDH).

Dr. Theodossis Theodossiou, leader of the research team, said, "We are delighted to have uncovered this alternative property of 5-ALA. The fact that 5-ALA is approved for the detection of malignant gliomas and GBM makes our findings more valuable and easier to apply in the clinic. "

Marina Vietri, project leader at from the Department og Molecular Biology and at CanCell, has received the Research Council of Norway "Researcher Project for Young Talents" grant, amounting to 8 mill NOK, for her project "Ruptured nuclear envelopes in cancer". In this project she aims to study the dynamics and effects of damaged nuclear envelope in cancer cells. 

The Young Research Talent grant is intended to give talented young researchers under the age of 40 in all disciplines and thematic areas the opportunity to pursue their ideas and lead a research project. This call is targeted towards researchers in the early stages of their careers, 2–7 years after defence of an approved doctorate, who have demonstrated the potential to conduct research of high scientific quality.

A study led by Sigrid S. Skånland, project group leader at Department of Cancer Immunology, demonstrates that functional testing of patient-derived tumor cells can predict response to therapy. 
In the new study, Skånland and her colleagues show that analysis of protein levels in tumor cells collected from CLL patients before they started therapy, or analysis of the cells’ sensitivity to a panel of different drugs, could predict how the patients responded to the therapy they received.

In a recent study from the Department of Neurology, Oslo University Hospital, researchers investigated DNA methylation across the genome in postmortem frontal cortex brain tissue from neurologically healthy controls and two closely related neurodegenerative disorders;  Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. The study identified a number of loci in the genome where DNA methylation is associated with the stage of neuropathological change seen in these brains. The results are reported in Nature Communications.