Research at Oslo University Hospital

Professor Johanna Olweus and her research team of 16 have received NOK 4.5 million in grants from the Danish Novo Nordisk Foundation. The money will be used to commercialize a whole new type of cancer immunotherapy that Olweus and her team are developing.
They have found a way to program cancer patients' immune cells to fight cancer using healthy human immune cells. This method allows the immune system to attack the cancer cells specifically, without harming other cells.

Findings from the Institute for Cancer Genetics and Informatics, recently published in the highly prestigious journal Lancet, has got front page coverage in the major Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten. The Lancet article - entitled "Deep learning for prediction of colorectal cancer outcome: a discovery and validation study" is jointly first-authored by Ole-Jacob Skrede and Sepp De Raedt, while institute director Håvard E. Danielsen is senior author.
Danielsen is interviewed for Aftenposten Feb 13th, and the front page newspaper article is entitled "Artificial intelligence finds cancer within 3 minutes".

An international team has completed the most comprehensive study of whole cancer genomes to date, significantly improving our fundamental understanding of cancer and signposting new directions for its diagnosis and treatment. The ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Project (PCAWG), a collaboration involving more than 1,300 scientists and clinicians from 37 countries, analyzed more than 2,600 genomes of 38 different tumour types, creating a huge resource of primary cancer genomes.

The Department of Cancer Genetics has contributed to ICGC's catalogues of whole genomes, the foundation for the analysis performed by PCAWG.

Lung cancer is a common disease, with approximately 3400 diagnosed with lung cancer each year in Norway. The prognosis is poor, but new treatment alternatives have improved the prospects of subgroups of this patient group. With the funding from the Norwegian Cancer Society the group plan to investigate new treatment alternatives, elucidate the mechanism behind development of resistance and identify new biomarkers. Overall the projects will benefit the patients by accelerating the transfer of new and promising treatments into clinical care and ensure increased inclusion of lung cancer patients into clinical trials.

The expert group consists of partners from several of the major hospitals in Norway, including Oslo University Hospital, Ahus, Vestre Viken, Haukeland, UNN, St.Olav and Stavanger University Hospital in addition to the Cancer Register and the patient organization.  Åslaug Helland, senior oncologist at the Department of Oncology at OUS, will coordinate the project.

The PainFact project has a total budget of €7,3 mill, and have been awarded €6 mill from the Horizon 2020-programme. The project is coordinated by The Norwegian Public Health Institute (Folkehelseinstituttet).

OUS with Bente Halvorsen at The Research Institute of Internal Medicine in front is a major collaborating partner in the project. Other partners in the consortium are, amongst many: Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), University of Strasbourg, deCode Genetics Iceland, The Quibim, Spain, and Tataa, Sweden (companies) and Dr. Christopher S. Nielsen, FHI as coordinator.

To regulate gene expression, two methods, RNA interference and CRISPR, have emerged as the most popular methods in the past few years. These two technologies have moved quickly from the lab to bedside.

Mouldy Sioud, head of the Immunomodulation and Targeted Therapies research group at the Department of Cancer Therapy is the editor of a recently published book in the Methods inf Molecular Biology series entitled RNA Interference and CRISPR Technologies.

A recent study from the Sections of Core Facilities/Radiation Biology/Tumor Immunology shows that the cell cycle can be completely resolved by mass cytometry, including subdivision of the G₁ and G₂ phases. Only a few markers are needed, and the remaining >50 parameters are free to measure the expression of other (phospho)proteins of interest. Stratification of cells into different cell cycle phases also made exclusion of non-single cell events possible, solving another problem in mass cytometry.

Oslo University Hospital is part of the PERCATHE (Personalised cancer therapies) consortium, aiming to develop new, powerful and frontiers-breaking methods to build an innovative and practicable pipeline for individualised precision treatment of cancer. PERCATHE is one of 14 convergence environments under UiO:Life Science - the largest priority area at UiO.
Consortium members -  OUS and UIO scientists Arnoldo Frigessi, Olav Engebråten,  Vessela Kristensen, Alvaro Köhn Luque and Carl Henrik Gørbitz - have recently published a feature article in the popular science "Knowledge" (Viten) section of the Norwegian major newspaper Aftenposten, entitled "Can statistics and mathematics save as many lives as new medicines?"