Tumor hypoxia promotes metastasis and resistance to radiotherapy in prostate cancer. An imaging method to assess hypoxia at diagnosis can help to select patients for intensified treatment and avoid overtreatment of indolent, low-risk disease; but has not been successfully developed for this disease. In this paper, postdocTord Hompland in Heidi Lyng's group at Department of Radiation Biology and his co-workers present a novel method to visualize hypoxia based on diagnostic, multiparametric diffusion weighted MR images (DW-MRI). The work is part of an ongoing collaboration between the group and the FuncProst research team, headed by Therese Seierstad and Knut Håkon Hole at Division of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at OUS. The method can easily be translated into clinical practice, and a large scale, prospective evaluation of the method is planned for prostate cancer.

Binding of growth factors to their receptors is known to cause endocytosis and degradation of the receptors and their ligands by a mechanism that involves the endosomal sorting complex required for transport (ESCRT) machinery. Failure of this mechanism can lead to cancer development. In a recent paper in Nature Communications, a team led by project leaders Eva Wenzel and Camilla Raiborg at Institute for Cancer Research and Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming has used advanced microscopy methods to reveal the dynamics of ESCRT recruitment and formation of multivesicular endosomes (MVEs) into which the receptor-ligand complexes are sorted for subsequent degradation.