News

Three Oslo University Hospital scientists received prestigous awards for their outstanding research on Friday June 9th.
The major prize - the "Excellent Researcher Award" - went to Bente Halvorsen. Kushtrim Kryeziu and Håvard O. Skjerven both received the "Early Career Award".
The prize money - 300.000 and 150.000 NOK respectively - is earmarked for research activities.

The awards are distributed anually in order to honour excellent scientific work. The awarding process is organized by the hospital's research committee, while an external Scientific Advisory Board has evaluated the candidates. 

Over the past week, two PhD candidates from the Department of Molecular Oncology successfully defended their theses at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo.

On June 2nd, M.D. Mari Bogaard presented her PhD thesis titled "On the hunt for improved biomarkers in primary prostate cancer – combining morphological features and molecular changes".

One week earlier, on May 26th, M.Sc. S. Hossein Moosavi defended his thesis on the "Clinical implications of transcriptomic and pharmacological tumor heterogeneity of metastatic colorectal cancers".

Kushtrim Kryeziu is 37 years and defended his PhD at the Medical University of Vienna in 2016. Kryeziu was recruited to the Lothe lab in 2016 via an EU financed fellowship and was included in the Scientia Fellows postdoc program at the University of Oslo. His recruitment has proven highly beneficial for the development of the current project on functional oncology in advanced solid tumors. His competence in molecular cell biology and hands-on experience with anti-cancer drug development was instrumental to the development of our pre-clinical pharmacogenomics platform. Kryeziu has recently accepted a permanent position at the Institute for Cancer Research. 

Ina A. Eilertsen and Christian Holst Bergsland defended their respective work in transcriptomics and molecular pathology of colorectal cancer, Maren Høland recently defended her work on genomics of Malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors, and Jonas Meier Strømme defended his computational analyses in solid tumors last week, 9^th Dec. Their PhD theses comprise a total of thirteen papers from our groups, including eleven first-authorships among the PhD candidates.

Molecular biologist Anita Sveen and surgeon Pål-Dag Line join forces in a new project to improve the patient benefit from liver transplantation of metastatic colorectal cancer. This is a collaborative effort between Dept Molecular Oncology (KRE) and Dept Transplantation Medicine (KIT)

The project is a translational substudy of ongoing clinical studies and will generate the first large-scale molecular and pharmacological data of transplantable metastatic colorectal cancers. This project was recently supported by a research grant from the Norwegian Cancer Society.

Anita Sveen, project group leader and member of the Lothe lab at the Department of Molecular Oncology at the Institute for Cancer research, was invited speaker at the AACR special conference colorectal cancer, held October 1-4th in Portland, Oregon, USA.
In her well received speech Dr. Sveen presented the multidisciplinary work from the TEAM-ACT (Tumor Evolution in Advanced Models to Accelerate precision Cancer Therapy) - a strategic research area of OUS. 

Our prostate cancer projects received attention and interest at the recent Norwegian Cancer Symposium held in Oslo and at the 34^th European Congress of Pathology held in Basel, Switzerland.

On the 21^st of April, the 4x-great-grandchild of Frederik Holst - the first who defended a doctoral thesis in Norway, University of Christiania - Christian Holst Bergsland defended his thesis “Fluorescence-based multiplex immunohistochemistry in precision medicine of colorectal cancer” for the PhD degree at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo.
He received excellent assessment from the committee, both in the written report and during the defense. The first and second opponents were Professors Manuel Salto-Tellez, Institute for Cancer Research, London and Lars Akslen, University of Bergen. Professor Anne Hansen Ree was the chair of the evaluation committee.

Gene expression profiling of multiple intra-patient tumor foci reveals new insights about the heterogeneity in prostate cancer.

Editorial and selected cover image for the calender year 2022 of BBA Rev on Cancer.