Two new PhDs
Jarle Bruun and Marianne A. Merok recently defended their theses for the PhD degree at the Medical Faculty, University of Oslo.
Jarle Bruun defended his thesis "Biomarkers with functional and clinical impact on colorectal cancer" the 24th of April, with professor David Kerr, University of Oxford, and professor Leonor David, University of Porto, as opponents. His work included detection of aberrant tumor expression pattern of three proteins with normal functions in cell signaling that predicted poor outcome for subgroups of colorectal cancer patients. New functional data between beta-catenin and connexin43 was demonstrated, and mutations in the cell cycle gene RCC2 was functionally validated and shown to have prognostic impact for patients with stage II colorectal cancer tumors with defect mismatch repair. Lack of protein expression of RCC2 was furthermore shown to identify mismatch repair proficient tumors with a poor prognosis.
Jarle Bruun performed his PhD work in the Molecular Genetics group, Dept Cancer Prevention.
Bruuns work has been presented in Dagens Medisin the 24th of April and at forskning.no the 17th of May.