2024 – Young talents
We recruited three young scientists to our department in 2024. Luis Nunes is a postdoc with competence in colorectal cancer genomics and recruited from Sweden after his PhD (Nunes et al., Nature 2024). Raquel Bartolome-Casado is a researcher with expertise in gut immunology and co-author on two Nature papers in 2024 from her postdoc in the Teichman lab (Polanski,*, Bartolome-Casado,* et al., Nature; Oliver AJ et al., Nature). Christian H Bergsland obtained his PhD in translational research of colorectal cancer in 2022 and was recruited back to the Lothe lab after a research stay in industry to pursue development of diagnostic protocols for functional oncology. Two young research talents, Ida Strømsvåg and Solveig Klokkerud, started their PhD studies.
We achieved our main goal to increase both the volume and scientific impact of our publications this year (n = 14).
Anita Sveen’s project group published articles in Nat Commun on transcriptomic subtypes of colorectal cancer with less vulnerability to tumor heterogeneity, in JCI Insight on clonal evolution of metastasis in high-grade serous ovarian adenocarcinoma, and in Mol Cancer on the prognostic impact of co-mutations in colorectal cancer. Researchers affiliated with our Dept also published articles in Nature, NEJM and Eur Urol.
Open call research grants from The Norwegian Cancer Society were awarded to two young scientists, Raquel Bartolome-Casado and Kushtrim Kryeziu.
Our ongoing innovation projects reached their expected milestones for 2024: BladMetrix (Primary inventor: Guro E. Lind) and ProClass (Primary inventor: Rolf I. Skotheim). Skotheim received innovation grants from Norwegian Cancer Society and South-Eastern Regional Health Authorities.
Four Department members successfully defended their academic degrees at the University of Oslo. Susanne G Kidd defended her PhD at the Institute for Clinical Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, with Rolf I Skotheim as main supervisor. Two MSc degrees were defended at the Depart. of Biosciences and one at Depart. of Informatics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences.
Scientific meetings/conferences
A meeting celebrating 45 years of the Porto-Oslo collaboration was organized in Porto, Portugal: “Current precision cancer medicine and emerging opportunities”. Scientific committee was Professors Ragnhild A Lothe, Leonor David and Manuel R Teixeira.
Rolf Skotheim, one of the speakers
The Norwegian Cancer Symposium 2024 was organized in Oslo with international and national speakers to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the Inst Cancer Research. RA Lothe and Bjarne Johannessen were members of the scientific and organizing committees, respectively.
Department members were invited speakers at 24 scientific meetings, including ten international meetings/conferences such as the European Hematology Association and Society for Functional Precision Medicine 1st joint meeting in Copenhagen*, the 39th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Urology, and EUDIP2024 - European Digital PCR symposium and workshop in Ghent, Belgium.
*Panel discussion: Philipp Staber (EXHALT trials), Keith Flaherty (NCI_MATCH trials, Kushtrim Kryeziu (EVIDENT trial)
Honors
Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe received the Porto Municipal Medal of Merit - Gold grade for her long-term contribution and collaboration with Scientific Institutions in Porto.
Lothe with the nominators Manuel Sobrinho-Simoes, Manuel R. Teixeira and Leonor David after the ceremony
- Associate professor Anita Sveen’s project group was awarded the OUS - excellent article prize for work on tumor heterogeneity in colorectal cancer published in Nat Commun.
- Researcher Raquel Bartolomé-Casado received the Norwegian Society for Immunology 2024 research award for her postdoc work in the Sara Teichman lab published in Nature.
- Postdoc Luis Nunes was awarded the “Basic Research Prize” for his oral presentation at the 28th Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society of Human Genetics, Porto.