Research at Oslo University Hospital

The Fridtjof Nansen award for excellence in science is for 2021 awarded to Professor Harald Alfred Stenmark for his outstanding research in the field of cellular and molecular biology, with particular focus on cancer research.

This prestigious prize is awarded to a Norwegian scientist, or a scientist residing in Norway, for scientific contributions of a high-level international importance. The award is given to inspire further work.

The award ceremony takes place at the annual meeting of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in May.

The AI-Mind project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, and is a five-year Research and Innovation Action (RIA) that officially starts in March 2021. It is led by Ira Haraldsen, head of the Cognitive Health Research group at the Department of Neurology, involves fifteen project partners from eight European countries and has a budget around 14 million Euro. The European funded research project stands out for intelligent digital tools for screening of brain connectivity and dementia risk estimation in people affected by mild cognitive impairment.

Understanding how immune mechanisms contribute to pathogensis is a major current challenge in neurodegenerative research, as an improved understanding of neuroinflammation could pave way for the development of disease-modifying therapies. Novel findings in Parkinson’s disease linking genetic disease risk to microglia - resident immune cells of the central nervous system - were recently published in Annals of Neurology by Lasse Pihlstrøm’s group.

The Epilepsy Research Group in Department of Neurology (ERGO - Epilepsy Research Group of Oslo) and the Department of Neurosurgery at Ullevål are now starting clinical studies of possible biomarkers for the development of epilepsy after head injuries. In the next round, it may be relevant to try out intervention treatment with medication.
The main study will be part of an international multi-center study we are now participating in and where Oslo could become one of the largest contributors. The project has received support from the CURE Epilepsy Foundation in the USA, which in turn has received USD 10 million from the US Department of Defense to study the mechanisms behind the development of post-traumatic epilepsy.

In the project entitled "A Novel Biomarker for Antibody Drug Conjugates" Weyergang and her team seeks to develop a diagnostic tool for better stratification of patients to novel targeted therapeutics including antibody drug conjugates.

SPARK is a Life Science`s innovation program build to increase the success rate of projects with high potential impact, addressing critical unmet needs. Project teams admitted to SPARK will be educated and advised on relevant processes for commercialization of their idea. They will also receive financial support (up to 500 000 NOK per year- maximum two years based on the accomplishment of milesones). 

Nikolai Engedal was recently awarded 9 million NOK in Open project support from The South-Eastern Norway Regional Health Authority (Helse Sør-Øst) 2020 call. The project aims to unravel the role of autophagy in prostate cancer formation and progression, to discover prognostic autophagy-related gene signatures and markers, and to identify autophagy-modulating drugs that can reduce cancer cell aggressiveness. Engedal is now starting up a project group in Eivind Hovig’s group at the Department of Tumor Biology.

Researcher Sigrid S. Skånland has been appointed project group leader in the group of Kjetil Taskén at the Department of Cancer Immunology, Institute for Cancer Research.
Her research group will focus on developing functional precision medicine for haematological cancers, in particular the B-cell malignancy chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). By performing functional analyses including ex vivo drug sensitivity screening and single cell signaling analyses, her aim is to identify biomarker signatures that can predict treatment outcomes for the individual patient.

A combined research effort by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and Oslo University Hospital/University of Oslo, Norway, shows exactly how tumors can overcome hurdles that occur when starved for certain building blocks used in protein synthesis.  
Update: The paper has recently received attention in "Nature Reviews Cancer".

On this web page you will find an overview over planned and ongoing clinical trials and other research projects at Oslo University Hospital related to COVID-19 and SARS CoV-2 infection. The information has been retrieved from applications to the regional ethics committee, the Norwegian Research Council, other funding sources, or directly from the researchers behind the projects.
An updated list of publications related to COVID-19 research at Oslo University Hospital can be found here.