Marthe Løvf defended her thesis for the PhD degree
On March 20th, Marthe Løvf defended her thesis "Detection of fusion genes and novel RNA variants in cancer" for the PhD degree. Earlier the same day, she presented a trial lecture over the topic "The Role of Cancer Stem Cells (CSCs) in Tumour Initiation and Therapy Resistance Acquisition". Løvf has performed her PhD in the Genome Biology Group at the Department of Cancer Prevention.
The thesis included three papers with focus on detection of cancer specific molecules with potential for improved diagnostication of cancer patients. Two of the three included papers focused on development of novel technology for improved detection and investigation of oncogenic fusion genes. This technology was used to investigate the presence of fusion genes in cell lines (Løvf et al., Genes, Chromosomes and Cancer, 2011) and in clinical sarcoma samples (Løvf et al., PLOS One, 2013), both with good results. In the third paper a novel transcript variant with potential as a biomarker for colorectal cancer was identified (Løvf et al., International Journal of Cancer, 2014).