Research at Oslo University Hospital

The Research Council of Norway and the Norwegian Cancer Society have allocated 128 mill. NOK for a Centre for Clincial Treatment Research for treatment of cancer. 

"This funding is an important contribution to Norwegian cancer research and will ensure that more patients will be included into clinical trials. The aim is new and better treatment alternatives for hard-to-treat cancers. We will develop next generation diagnostics and treatment for increased overall survival and quality of life for cancer patients all over Norway" says Åslaug Helland, leader of the centre.

In 2022, a new ICT platform, Forskningsportalen, will be established and made available for researchers at OUS and HSØ. The new portal will offer access to a flexible and sharable workspace, some computing capacity and data storage. The migration will start slowly with some pilot projects and will then be extended over time. When all data has been securely migrated, the plan is to terminate Forskernett.

All users on Forskernett are asked to complete a survey with deadline on Dec 8 (extended) to prepare for the migration process. 

The Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland) are together setting up national clinical precision cancer trials modelled on the very successful DRUP trial in the Netherlands.

‘This is "a triple win” - for cancer patients, investigators and industry partners’, says Kjetil Tasken from IMPRESS-Norway, ‘as we will generate and gather evidence more rapidly on very rare combinations of diagnosis, mutation and treatment to allow for early implementation of new cancer medicines.’

In a recent article in Nature Communications, published online on the 12 of November, 2021, project group leader Kay Oliver Schink and his coworkers in Harald Stenmark’s group at the Institute for Cancer Research and the Centre for Cancer Cell Reprogramming (CanCell) identify a new mechanism how the protein Phafin2 can regulate a process called “macropinocytosis”.

TRANSVAC - a collaborative infrastructure project funded by the European Commission (EC), currently under Horizon 2020 - is designed to accelerate vaccine development by enhancing European vaccine research and training. As a partner in the TRANSVAC project, EATRIS - European Infrastructure for Translational Medicine - would like to bring attention to the following upcoming initiatives:

Vaccine Training Courses: Deadline December 15th, 2021
TRANSVAC2 also offers free training courses to provide fundamental and advanced knowledge on a wide range of vaccine development-related topics.

Vaccine Development Services: Deadline January 15th, 2022
TRANSVAC2 offers high-quality technical services to support the development of prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines for both human and animal use.

Anita Sveen from the Department of Molecular Oncolocy is this year's winner of the prestigious Dr. Ragnar Mørk's Prize for cancer research. Anita received the prize of NOK 200.000 for her excellent work on colorectal cancer during an award ceremony in the Auditorium of the Research building on Friday 19th November. After receiving the prize, Anita gave a 30-minutes presentation of her work, and this was be followed by cakes and drinks in the canteen area.

The current use of precision medicine improves specificity of cancer treatment, but not in all patients. Better predictive markers for clinical response are therefore warranted.

The study "RAB5A expression is a predictive biomarker for trastuzumab emtansine in breast cancer", led by Dr Anette Weyergang, is the first demonstrating that proteins involved in intracellular transport can be utilized as biomarkers for ADC treatment. The manuscript has been published in Nature Communications.

In this work, recently published in Journal of ImmunoTherapy of cancer, Kjersti Flatmark, Else Marit Inderberg and coworkers suggest a novel treatment strategy for GNAS-mutated pseudomyxoma peritonei. The work forms the rationale for a new study, the Pseudovax trial, which will test this therapeutic concept.