Research at Oslo University Hospital

Anette Weyergang – project group leader at Institute for Cancer Research (ICR), Oslo University Hospital - is on December 11^th awarded the prize Researcher-of-the-Year from the leadership at ICR for her groundbreaking scientific contributions. The award of 100,000 NOK is financed by the Radium Hospital Foundation (Radiumhospitalets legater) and is a personal scholarship for stimulating further excellence in research. 

The leadership group highlights the important work Weyergang has done to characterize the role of Rab proteins in the intracellular transport of antibody-drug conjugates such as for example trastuzumab-derukstekan (Enhertu®). This work has been published in Nature Communication and led to the establishment of Rab Diagnostics AS. 

Dr. Casado is shared 1^st author on the paper “Immune microniches shape intestinal Treg functions” published in Nature. This work was conducted during her postdoc stay in Professor Sarah Teichmann’s lab (Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK), in collaboration with Professor Fiona Powrie’s lab (University of Oxford, UK).
Dr. Casado has spent several years working in Norway with gut immunology in the Jahnsen lab at Dept. of Pathology, and was recently recruited to the Lothe lab at Institute for Cancer Research to pursue her academic career and combine research interests in gut immunology with translational research on colorectal cancer.

Researcher Stian Foss from Jan Terje Andersen's research group at the Department of Immunology got the Norwegian Society forImmunology prize for the best research article published in 2024.
Foss received the prize at the 42nd Annual Meeting and General Assembly of the Norwegian Society for Immunology, Nov 29.
The article was published in March 2024 in Nature Communications and describes new Fc technology that may be broadly applicable in antibody design of new therapeutics with enhanced half-life and mucosal distribution.

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Professor Johannes Espolin Roksund Hov has received over 23 million kroner over the next five years from the European Research Council to investigate the interaction between intestinal bacteria and the development of serious liver diseases, for the project "Fatty liver versus autoimmunity of the bile ducts - defining the gut signals driving steatosis and inflammatory disease of the gut-liver axis (FatVersusBile)". Hov is senior consultant at Department of Transplantation Medicine and heads the research group "Genomics and Metagenomics in Inflammatory Disorders" at the at the Norwegian PSC Research Center and Research Institute of Internal Medicine. 

In order to stimulate excellent research and draw attention to the hospital's research activity, Oslo University Hospital rewards outstanding publications every half-year.

Six research groups were awarded for their excellent papers published the first half-year of 2024 during a ceremony on November 28th. Each group received NOK 50.000 earmarked for further research, and the prize winners gave short presentations of their main findings.

A team of scientists has made a groundbreaking discovery that could explain why certain prostate cancer therapies are less effective than expected. With 5,000 Norwegian men diagnosed with the disease annually, resulting in roughly 1,000 deaths every year, a major clinical objective is to prevent the spread of cancer and recurrence. 

The study was published in Nature Communications November 16th. Alfonso Urbanucci from the Institute of Cancer Research is shared senior author.

A European consortium coordinated by Sigrid S. Skånland, project group leader at the Department of Cancer Immunology, has been awarded an EP PerMed grant co-funded by the European Commission for their project “Chronic lymphocytic leukemia: Improving survival and quality of life (CLL-OUTCOME)”.

The vision of the European Partnership for Personalised Medicine is to “improve health outcomes within sustainable healthcare systems through research, development, innovation and implementation of personalised medicine approaches for the benefit of patients, citizens, and society”.

At a two days meeting in Porto about “Precision cancer medicine and emerging opportunities” the former director of the Norwegian Radium hospital, Jan Vincents Johannessen, received the distinction Ordem de Sant´lago da Espada from the President of Portugal. The meeting celebrated the long term collaboration in diagnostics and research, which was initiated by the young pathologists J.V. Johannessen and Manuel Sobrinho-Simoes.
The scientific program was organized by Professors Ragnhild A Lothe, Leonor David and Manuel R Teixeira from these institutions, respectively.