Department head: Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe
Deputy department head: Professor Rolf I. Skotheim
Laboratory manager: Ina Andrassy Eilertsen
Department administrative consultant: Ikram Mahnin

As a research department within the OUH Comprehensive Cancer Centre, it is our responsibility and goal to accomplish high quality and interdisciplinary biomedical research for improved precision medicine and management of cancer patients.

Research groups

Genetics	Genome Biology	Epigenetics

Project groups

Computational Oncology	Cell Signalling	Cancer Informatics

2022 – Translational research enters the clinic
2021 – 15th Anniversary of Dept. Molecular Oncology
The year 2020
Scientific achievements in 2019

About

Our main research programs are devoted to colorectal cancer and prostate cancer, and we have a longstanding project portfolio also on other solid tumor types. Our expertise in biomedical research spans several disciplines from cell biology to translational research, including also active clinical research collaborations, and we have a broad range of advanced technologies established in-lab. The department scientists are inventors of several biomedical patents and active innovation projects.

Lothe lab – genetics, genomics, cell signaling, colorectal cancer, MPNST, tumor heterogeneity, pharmacogenomics, biomarkers

Skotheim lab – genome biology, bioinformatics, tumor heterogeneity, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, testicular cancer

Lind lab – epigenetics, genetics, GI-cancers, bladder cancer, early detection, monitoring

Affiliations

All three group leaders are adjunct professors at the University of Oslo and are affiliated with the Institute for Clinical Medicine, the Institute for Biosciences and the Institute for Informatics. We aim to complete at least 3 academic degrees annually, and since the inauguration of the Department in 2006, 75 MSc/PhD degrees have successfully been defended.

The research groups are partners of the Oslo University Hospital strategic research area - Precision colorectal cancer therapy, colorectal cancer COST – actions, The Global Testicular Cancer Consortium, The European network for study on Cholangiocarcinoma, a European multicenter study on MPNST (malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor), The Norwegian Esophageal Cancer Consortium

Latest News

Heidi Pharo attended the NextGen Omics 2023 Conference in London the 9^th – 10^th of November and presented a poster about the bladder cancer research in the Lind lab, including a national multicenter clinical trial using the BladMetrix urine test for detecting recurrences. The poster received great attention, and was one of three posters achieving the Young Scientist Award (YSA) for best poster presentation. The three winners each received a £1000 travel grant, the Oxford Globals’ Omics PLUS Pass, a trophy and the opportunity to provide a 10 minutes oral presentation at the conference the following day.

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.

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.