PROGRAM (program with additional speakers will be released by August 15, 2025) 

Welcome by Moderators & Co-Chairs

Else Marit Inderberg, PhD, Unit Leader, Translational Research Unit, Section for Cell Therapy, Department of Oncology, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway

&

Tuva Holt Hereng, PhD, Senior Manager R&D Cell Therapy, Oslo, Norway

Speaker 

Development of CAR-Treg therapies to modulate immune responses in transplantation and autoimmunity
Nathalie Belmonte, PhD, Senior VP Research and Technical Development, Quell Therapeutics

Solving CAR-T Manufacturing and QC Challenges with Structured Support and Strategic Solutions
Anna Pasetto, PhD, Associate Professor, Director of Center for Advanced Cell Therapy (ACT), Oslo University Hospital, Norway

Automated manufacturing of CAR effector cells: From viral to non-viral gene transfer
Ulrike Kohl, MD, PhD, Institute Director / University Professor, Institute of Clinical Immunology, Medical Faculty, University of Leipzig and Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, Germany.

Maximizing the Innate Power of NK cells in cancer therapy
Ebba Sohlberg, PhD, Researcher and Project Manager at the Center for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden

Additional speakers will be confirmed and updated here.

NOTE about a workshop the next day:

On October 9, 2025, 9am-5pm at OCC Innovation Park: You are invited to register your interest to join a specialized workshop conducted by Thermo Fisher Scientific. Please register your interest with corinna.pohl@thermofisher.com, who will contact you early Q3 2025 about the program.

We are happy to annunce that Christopher Forcaods who has been at the unit for 4 years will noon defend his thesis to obtain the degree of Philosophiae Doctor (PhD) deliver by the Medical Faculty of the University of Oslo.

(The hero in action 2 years ago)

You can either come to this address: Auditorium Nye RAD L1 (U1), Bygg L, Radiumhospitalet, Ullernchausseen 70

Or follow him online: 

10:15 AM Trial Lecture:  “Ideas and solutions for in vivo generation of chimeric antigen receptor T cells”

Launch Meeting - Zoom

1:15 PM Public Defense: “Development of novel Chimeric Antigen Receptors against alternative targets”

Launch Meeting - Zoom

More information can be found here

Congratulations to Dr. Christopher Forcados:

(picture S. Joaquina)

Sandy Joaquina will defend her thesis on the 26th of May:

The morning session (10:15) will be: "Epigenetic regulation of T-cell exhaustion"

and the defense (13:15):“Novel strategies for Chimeric Antigen Receptor therapies”

(Sandy at work, photo SW)

On the 27th, together with barnekreftforeningen and the Norwegian society for Immunology, we will organize a symposium with our prestigious guests. 

27^th of May 2025

Institute for Cancer Research, large Auditorium, K-building

Coffee at 9:15, starts at 9:30

Congratulations to Sandy for completing her thesis yesterday and special thanks to the opponents for their great work:

(right to left): Else Marit Inderberg - Asbjørn Christophersen - Sébastien Anguille - SANDY - Laurie Menger -  

Sébastien Wälchli - Haakon Breien Benestad

You can get more information here

We are extremly thankful to Radiumhospitalet Legater for their financial support to acquire a Lumicks z-movi device for Avidity analysis. We are greatful to the Head of our Clinic for making this acquisition possible.

(Picture. C. Forcados: z-movi freshly tagged with Legater sign)

It is now in place and running. Together with the OUS-core facility we have established a booking system and appointed two responsible scientists here. By mid-April we might be able to support future users.

Future users will have access to the booking system once training has been carried out, please contact Else Marit Inderberg or Sebastien Wälchli to organize the training.

We were interviewed and our thoughts can be found here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2057813/14847674

Special thanks to Aristi and Martin for the nice moment!

The first ever Scandinavian TCR tested in the clinic is our Radium-1 and the clinical report is now published in Molecular Therapy

we will welcome two speakers on Thursday the 11^th of April at 14:00-15:00 at the Institute for Cancer Research main Auditorium (here)

Pablo Menendez (Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain)

Cell-of-origin, pathobiology and therapeutics of MLL-rearranged B-cell ALL

Magdalena Winiarska (Medical University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland)

Development of alternative CAR constructs targeted against refractory B-cell malignancies

 ->CAR aficionados are welcome to stay longer for an after-speech informal discussion with our guests<-

Sandy and Léa have succesfully presented articles at the Oslo Immunology Journal Club!

This is probably the best innovation in immunology these last years, please register (https://sympa.uio.no/medisin.uio.no/info/oslo-immunology-jc) and come to the A3.3067 room at Rikshospitale every Friday at 9:00 (snacks at 8:45) or follow the permanent link on zoom:

https://uio.zoom.us/j/64951926564?pwd=blh5K2pETzNDdWFuMmlJTnE3RkoxZz09

Meeting ID: 649 5192 6564
Passcode: 757331

We were glad to attend to the NSI annual meeting 2023.

Congratuations to our team for their active participation and a special thanks to our selected speakers, Nicholas and Christopher (best presentation prize winner):

Pictures: Sandy Joaquina

If you are interested, please reggister:

https://oslocancercluster.no/events/event/the-cellfit-project-workshop/

It's not always easy to recapitulate in vivo activity in plastics. Re-challenge is one of these methods that might contribute to a better understanding of CAR Tc biology, while avoiding the use of animals. This is one of our protocols, there are many more (we hope we cited most of them) and there is still a long road until an artificial environment will be able to help us to predict how T cell will behave in clinical settings.

Here is a link to your free pdf (valid for a month or so): https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1hlxb,25QIopT0

Delighted to announce that we received the Innovation prize 2023 from our TTO (Inven2). DogBite is a collaboration with our friends (and colleagues) from the University of Bergen which we hope will be the first step towards realistic animal models for validation of immunotherapy. More information can be found here: (article in Norwegian but movie in English). We are grateful to Inven2 for their support (and the nice party)!

The winning team: Pascal Gelebart-Sébastien Wälchli-Vibeke Samuelsen Fosse-Emmet McCormack

The supporting team: Sandy Joaquina-Klara Krpina-Christopher Forcados-Shoaib Diaa Ahmed-Alicia Villatoro-Lindsey Scott

Finally out! We are extremely happy to announce the publication of two other babies from our CAR factory: OSCARs which, like their brothers and sisters, were designed from antibodies isolated long time ago at Oslo University Hospital.
The article can be found here: https://rdcu.be/dd5IY

Our home-made anti-CD22 CAR is now published in JBC: here

In addition to show that IS7 antibody generates an efficient CAR, we also show that anti-CD22 can be used as a BiTE. We are gratefull to all the co-authors and to our collaborators in Poland for their excellent work!

IPerGlio project started with this meeting on the 13th of June, with the aim of improving personalised glioblastoma treatment by immunomics and AI approaches!
We are glad to coordinate this project that will certainly result in a fruitful collaboration with our excellent partners from Italy, Luxembourg, Spain and Germany. The project is supported by RCN, IT-MoH, FNR, ISCIII/FCAECC, and BMBF, under the frame of ERA PerMed.
Looking very much forward to work together!

Our Unit was nicely represented at the last CIMT meeting:

Sandy                                               Lea

Nadia                                                Alicia

IperGlio is coordinate by Else Marit Inderberg and this is how it will work:

If you want to know more, please consult the ERA PerMed newsletter

Congratulations to Christopher and Alicia who presented articles at the last Oslo Immunology Journal Club session!

Please register to the mainling list if you are interested to participate both physically and online:

https://sympa.uio.no/medisin.uio.no/info/oslo-immunology-jc

Our heroes in action:

This year our lab participated actively to the NSI annual meeting. Congratulations to all the poster presenters and to our two speakers: Nadia Mensali and Benjamin Caulier who obtained the prize for the best presentation!

Our heroes in action:

Congratulations to the team for the Best Poster Award!

A good collaboration established between NTNU, OUS and ThermoFischer on the CellFit project.

Contact meeting through Digital Life Norway (2022):

A vaccine study with Ultimovacs involving Else Marit Inderberg :

A study with our friends from Cancer Immunology (Smeland/Myklebust team) involving Sébastien Wälchli:

We are very happy to be part of this clinical article on hTERT vaccines. Congratulations to Else Marit Inderberg and Nadia Mensali from our team!

Sébastien Wälchli was interviewed by theThe Nordic Cell Therapy Podcast about his vision for CAR therapy and his thoughts can be heard here

Congratulations to Christopher Forcados who published his first article, a review, on CAR T cell metabolism and its detection using Seahorse technology

Else Marit Inderberg and Nadia Mensali wrote a review on Immunotherapy in Glioblastom that can be found here

We are very proud to be part of the NAN-4-TUM consortium (Leader: S. Scala), videos from the different projects have been published, you can vote for ours!

Very happy to share our technical report in Methods in Cell Biology describing our protocols to prepare and test CAR Tc in vivo. A special thanks to our former colleagues Anne Fåne and Marit Myhre for their fantastic work over the years!

Interesting interview (in Norwegian) about combination immunotherapy from our lab member Anna Winge-Main who is also an expert clinician on the subject.

Very happy to be be part of this nice paper from our friends and collaborators the ALTERCAR consortium (Medical University of Warsaw):

CD37CAR was licensed out to CellPoint, a dutch biotech designing an "unconventional" CAR-T cell treatment for all patients. You can find the articles here and here, an English translation will soon be available.

Two inventors:

The cocoon:

Congratulations to Rafaela Abrantes and our collaborators from the Ceslo Reis laboratory in i3S (Porto) for the nice review on CAR and inovative targets:

We are happy to share our this new publication which was the result of a fruitful collaboration between our group and Kjersti Flatmark's team.  We here report about a vaccine solution for patients suffering Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP). We thank Helse Sør Øst (#2019004) for the support.

Nadia Mensali has been invited by the Hellenic Society of Gene Therapy
and Regenerative Medicine to give a presentation:

"Design and validation of CAR directed against osteosarcoma"

at the

"Gene and Cell Therapies: New Perspectives for old diseases - Web Event" on Friday 26 November. More information can be found here

Thanks to the Local Organizing Committee & the International Scientific Committee for this fantastic PIVAC21 meeting in beautiful Granada!

We are happy to share our new publication about a modified version of PD-1 receptor, or how to turn something negative to an enhancing molecule. There have been a few reports this year showing technologies similar to ours, suggesting that interest for associated molecules to increase the binding might represent a solution to improve cell -based therapy. We thank all co-authors and of course our support: Helse Sør Øst, The Research Council of Norway and The Norwegian Cancer Society

Paper 1:

Targeting KRAS mutations with HLA class II-restricted TCRs for the treatment of solid tumors

Paper 2:

Circulating Tumor Cell Persistence Associates with Long-TermClinical Outcome to a Therapeutic Cancer Vaccine inProstate Cancer

Ingrid Jenny Guldvik, Lina Ekseth, Amar U. Kishan, Andreas Stensvold, Else Marit Inderberg and Wolfgang Lilleby

We are very proud of Synne Halvorsen Hougsnæs who succesfully defended her Master of Science in Biotechnology:

"CMV-specific Immune Responses Induced by Dendritic Cell Vaccines in Glioblastoma patients
And Clinical Benefit"

The normal protocol was respected:

Defense                                                                       Flowers                                                         Cake

Anna Winge-Main, who is medical oncologist (melanoma), but also PhD student in our unit has been interviewed (here) to give an overview of the melanoma studies presented in ASCO-2021:

Clara has successfully defended her Master thesis today and will join us next week.

We now know that one should be careful when selecting LB medium.

Credit: C. Forcados laptop at OCCI social area

Congratulations to Anna Winge-Main, PhD student in our unit and MD at the Department of Oncology (OUS), who has published a case report in the British Medical Journal (Case Reports):

Our method to clone CAR from hybridoma is finally cited in Pubmed:

More impotrantly it also present the first anti-Iglambda CAR:

Anna Winge-Main speaks at the session “Navigating Early-Stage Melanoma: Systemic Treatment Today and in the Future?” at the 10th World Congress of Melanoma/17th EADO Congress Industry Satellite Symposium 15^th of April 2021

https://worldmelanoma2021.com//files/2021/04/28-Final-Programme-WCM-2021.pdf

Congratulations to our collaborator and friend Andres Maturana for his last publication integrating some of our design (NB: this is not immunotherapy!)

More information here

Find out more about this excellent training program of ADVANCE 

Credit: ADVANCE, linkedIN

Targeting telomerase with an HLA class II-restricted TCR for cancer immunotherapy.

Freshly published in Molecular Therapy

and Combinatorial CAR design improves target restriction.

Published in Journal of Biological Chemistry

Your are most welcom to read the first article here and the second here !

Inven2 celebrates 10 years of collaboration with leading senior researchers bringin new products and services on market. Therefore, find out more informations about Dr. Else-Marit Inderberg's (group leader and head of immunomonitoring) interview here !

Else Marit Inderberg på laben. Foto: Elisabeth Kirkeng Andersen.

The Seahorse XFe96 Analyzer (Agilent) measures the oxygen consumption rate (OCR) and extracellular acidification rate (ECAR) of live cells in a 96-well plate format.

OCR and ECAR rates are key indicators of mitochondrial respiration and glycolysis as well as ATP production rate. Together these measurements will provide a clear view of cellular metabolic function in cultured cells such as Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)- and T-cell Receptor (TCR)-modified cells !

More informations here !

Credit: Janne Nestvold (OCCI)

Solveig Mjelstad Olafsrud (Engineer) and Benjamin Caulier (Postdoc) will take care of it !

Immunotherapy & Biotechnology: Validation of humanized Chimeric Antigen Receptors targeted against solid tumour

Find out more here !

Any questions about the position can be sent to the following e-mail address: sebastw@rr-research.no

Join the Oslo Cancer Cluster virtual event presented during Oslo Innovation Week (September 2020) and hear from stakeholders who inspire innovation, protect innovation and provide the necessary tools for innovation.

Found out more at OCCi website !

Credit: OCCi

This is how lab discussions emerge ;)

Here is Patrik Vernhoff (Postdoc NFR, our favorite biostatistician !) air-presenting vanishing expression profil on PCA.

Credits: SW

Don't miss the journal club of Monday, 14th of September 2020.

Benjamin CAULIER, Postdoc, will present an article published in Immunity that deals with sustainability of CAR expression and response persistence using Ubiquitination modifications.

Credits: From Wentao Li et al:, Article in Immunity Volume 53, ISSUE 2, P456-470.e6, August 18, 2020

The journal club will take place in the usual 5^th floor meeting room after the lab meeting (around 12h). See you there !

Hakan Köksal will present: Designed protein logic to target cells with precise combinations of surface antigens (Marc J. Lajoie et al., 2020) (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/08/19/science.aba6527.full)

Nadia Mensali will present: An RNA vaccine drives immunity in checkpoint-inhibitor-treated melanoma ( Ugur Sahin et al., 2020) (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2537-9)

The Zoom link will be uptaded soon, make sure to schedule this event in your agenda !

The Norwegian biotech Zelluna Immunotherapy, based on a licence from our Translational Research Unit (Group leaders: Else Marit Inderberg and Sebastien Wälchli's group), received NOK 83 million to pursue their development on TCR-redirected NK cells !

We are very happy that an innovation developped five years ago by the early team (G. Gaudernack, G. Kvalheim, EM Inderberg and S. Wälchli) is now being developed as a therapeutic product. We thank our co-workers for their hard work, Inven2 for their support in the commercial development, and NFR, Helse Sør-Øst and Kreftforeningen  for their financial support and guidance.  

The team in Boston concluded that lobster is better than business:

The concept (with the old name):

Design: P. Dillard

Find more about this here !

We published a new review in Scandinavian Journal of Immunology on how to adapt TCR redirected T-cells therapy to fight melanoma!

Make sure to have a look here!

We published a review on putative targets in ovarian cancer for CAR therapy in Scandinavian Journal of Immunology! Make sure to have a look here!

We published a new article in BMC Biotechnology on how to use colorectal cyst as a tool for the pre-clinical development of CAR T-cells.

Make sure to check the article here!

Hakan Köksal successfully defended his Ph.D. entitled “Novel designs and approaches in CAR T cells” Thursday 28th May.

All of his colleagues are proud of his work and his achievements!

M.Sc Hakan Köksal at Institute of Clinical Medicine will be defending the thesis “Novel designs and approaches in CAR T cells” for the degree of PhD (Philosophiae Doctor).

Due to the current pandemic situation, the University of Oslo is closed and the public defence will be held as a video conference over Zoom here.

The defence will follow regular procedure as far as possible, hence it will be open to the public and the audience can ask ex auditorio questions when invited to do so.

Else Marit Inderberg and Nadia Mensali took part in a paper showing the treatment of posttransplantation lymphoproliferative disease by using retransplantation, make sure to check it here!

Baoyan Bai, June Helen Myklebust and Sébastien Wälchli just published a protocol on how to edit B cell lymphoma using CRISPR/Cas9 technology, make sure to have a look here!

Sébastien Wälchli and Mouldy Sioud published also a protocol on CRISPR/Cas9 as a tool for adoptive cell therapy. More information here!

Finally, Nicholas Casey published recently a paper on the use of RNAi with TCR transfer to enhance safety and efficiency. Follow the guide!

We participated to the EATRIS annual meeting in Lisbon and presented our work. We thank all the team for their great work and their commitment in this infrastructure.

Sympathetic improvement of cancer vaccine efficacy

Full text can be found here

A recent article in Nature Immunology showed a new type of T-cells that could improve cell-based therapies.

Forskning has asked Else Marit her opinion about it and about the latest developments in this field. Make sure to have a look here!

A new review from Else Marit Inderberg and Sebastien Wälchli was published in Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy. The review described how we can isolate and identify therapeutic TCRs from long-term surviving patients.

Make sure to have a look here!

Amanda Ruud defended her Master at the University of Oslo, Wednesday (18/12). Her thesis title was: "Identification and pre-clinical assessment of patient-derived TCRs for solid tumor immunotherapy"

Pierre won the award with his talk entitled: "Targeting telomerase with an MHC class II restricted TCR for cancer immunotherapy". Make sure to have a look at his abstract!

We will be at the annual NSI meeting, the 29th of November!

We will talk about our latest progress on CAR and TCR therapy. See you there!

Sebastien Wälchli was invited at the 1st meeting ASEICA-ASPIC on Immunotherapy to talk about TCR based ACT.

Sebastien Walchli, a group leader in our department, gave an interview to the technical transfer office of the hospital: Inven2.

Make sure to check it here !

Emmanuelle Benard will present our last improvements on CD37 CAR T-cell therapy. Make sure to check the program of the conference and her abstract !

Nadia Mensali and Marit R. Myhre published a new study entitled: "Preclinical assessment of transiently TCR redirected T cells for solid tumour immunotherapy". A copy of the study published in Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy can be found here.

We were at the last PIVAC (Progress in Vaccination Against Cancer) 2019 !

Else Marit and Hedvig presented our most recent developments !

Make sure to check their abstracts !

Yesterday Lizet Baken successfully defended her Bachelor Thesis at the Avans University of Applied Sciences.

Part of this thesis was performed in our lab where she has been working on an anti-Ig-lambda CAR.

Congratulations Lizet, we are all very proud of you!

We published a new paper on the CAR manufacturing from hybridoma to T-cell expression. The paper is published in Antibody Therapeutics, make sure to have a look here and here !

Else Marit Inderberg, Sebastien Wälchli, Nadia Mensali and Elizabeth Baken will attend CIMT 2019 meeting in Mainz (21 to 23 May).

Make sure to look at their abstracts.

CIMT website

CIMT program

We published pre-clinical results of the first 100% Norwegian CAR: CD37CAR, an alternative to CD19CAR.

Make sure to have a look here and here !

Our collaborators published a new paper on TIGIT and PD-1 as markers of reduced effector function of T-cells in B-cell lymphoma.

Make sure to have a look here !

Gunnar Kvalheim, Hakan Köksal and Pierre Dillard will be at the next AACR meeting (29th of March to 3rd of April, Atalanta) to talk about new developments in CAR.

Hakan will present a novel combination method for IGKCAR that prevents B-cell aplasia.

Pierre will present the pre-clinical validation of CD37CAR, an alternative to CD19CAR.

Make sure to have a look!

Pierre Dillard will present our rescent work on the pre-clinical validation of CD37 CAR T-cells in Barcelona (11 - 13 March 2019).

Make sure to take a look at the abstract and at the conference website !

We published a new paper on redirected NK cells, transduced with TCR.

Make sure to take a look at the paper here !

New publication from Nadia Mensali in OncoImmunology.

This article decribe the loading of MCHI and II molecules by using CD74 constructs.

Make sure to check it out here!

We published a new review on the treatment of osteosarcoma by CAR therapy.

Make sure to have a looke here !

We published a new protocol on the assessment of CAR activity by spheroids. Have a look at our paper here and on the OCCi website news.

Emmanuelle Benard who did her PhD in Biophysics and Immunology in Marseille, just joined us ! 

She will be in charge of the development of new CAR T-cells.

We had our first JOVE shooting on a new metod to generate spheroid for CAR T-cells screening.

Make sure to give it a look (once it is out) !

PIVAC 2018 was held in Oslo, co-organized by the department of Cell Therpay. The conference permitted to share new advance in the field of vaccination and future prospects for immunotherapy. 

Gunnar Kvalheim, Else Marit Inderberg, Sebastien Wälchli and Nadia Mensali will attend CIMT 2018 meeting in Mainz (15 to 17 May).

Make sure to look at their abstracts.

CIMT website

CIMT program

Sebastien Wälchli will present the depatment of Cellular Therapy at the 25th Porto Cancer Meeeting.

More details here and here! 

Pierre Dillard will attend the 2018 meeting of the American Association for Cncer Research (AACR). He will present our recent work on universal killer, make sure to have a look !

Human c-SRC kinase (CSK) overexpression makes T cells dummy

Patient safety upon immunotherapy treatment is a challenge that still need to be adressed.

In this publication we report how by affecting c-SRC kinase we can make T-cells "dummy": effector cells are still able to recognize and bind to the target but unable to carry on with their activation. This mechanism could potentially open the way for a safe-lock system permitting to reduce off-target toxicity.

Image from: Ellen Tenstad/Science Shaped