Department head: Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe
Deputy department head: Professor Rolf I. Skotheim
Laboratory manager: Ina Andrassy Eilertsen
Department administrative consultant: Ikram Mahnin

As a research department within the OUH Comprehensive Cancer Centre, it is our responsibility and goal to accomplish high quality and interdisciplinary biomedical research for improved precision medicine and management of cancer patients.

Research groups

Genetics

Genome Biology

Epigenetics

Project groups

Computational Oncology	Cell Signalling	Functional Precision Oncology
Cancer Informatics

About

Our main research programs are devoted to colorectal cancer and prostate cancer, and we have a longstanding project portfolio also on other solid tumor types. Our expertise in biomedical research spans several disciplines, and we have a broad range of advanced technologies established in-lab.

The group leaders are adjunct professors at the University of Oslo and are affiliated with the Institute for Clinical Medicine, the Institute for Biosciences and the Institute for Informatics. We aim to complete at least 3 academic degrees annually, and since the inauguration of the Department in 2006, 48 MSc and 41 PhD degrees have successfully been defended.

Summary annual highlights – 2023: Experimental diagnostics enters the clinic

Latest News

Dr. Nunes was awarded the “Basic Research Prize” for his great oral presentation at the 28th Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society of Human Genetics (SPGH), held in Porto from December 5^th to 7^th, 2024. His presentation focused on research conducted in the Lothe’s Lab, exploring prognostic subtypes of co-occurring mutations in colorectal cancer. The presentation was selected as one of four prize-winning oral communications among the works submitted to the meeting.

Dr. Casado is shared 1^st author on the paper “Immune microniches shape intestinal Treg functions” published in Nature. This work was conducted during her postdoc stay in Professor Sarah Teichmann’s lab (Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK), in collaboration with Professor Fiona Powrie’s lab (University of Oxford, UK).
Dr. Casado has spent several years working in Norway with gut immunology in the Jahnsen lab at Dept. of Pathology, and was recently recruited to the Lothe lab at Institute for Cancer Research to pursue her academic career and combine research interests in gut immunology with translational research on colorectal cancer.

The Computational Oncology project group headed by Assoc. professor Anita Sveen was awarded excellent article prize from OUS for their work on intra-tumor heterogeneity in colorectal cancer. 

Read more in news article from www.ous-research.no:
Oslo University Hospital has awarded 6 excellent articles for the first half-year of 2024

At a two days meeting in Porto about “Precision cancer medicine and emerging opportunities” the former director of the Norwegian Radium hospital, Jan Vincents Johannessen, received the distinction Ordem de Sant´lago da Espada from the President of Portugal. The meeting celebrated the long term collaboration in diagnostics and research, which was initiated by the young pathologists J.V. Johannessen and Manuel Sobrinho-Simoes.
The scientific program was organized by Professors Ragnhild A Lothe, Leonor David and Manuel R Teixeira from these institutions, respectively.

The European Haematology Association and the Society for Functional Precision Medicine held their first joint meeting on Precision Medicine in Copenhagen September 25th – 27th. Kushtrim Kryeziu was invited speaker to session 1 on precision medicine trials where he presented his work on patient-derived organoids from liver metastases, discussing tumor heterogeneity and the design of the EVIDENT trial.

In this session, the NCI-MATCH and EXALT trials were also presented. The presenters of the three trials were then invited to participate in a panel debate, and Kryeziu presented pros and cons of the EVIDENT trial.

The Porto Municipal Medals ceremony for 2024 was held on July 9^th, recognising several individuals and institutions for their distinguished merits and civic achievements. Among the recipients of the Medal of Merit - Gold grade, was Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe from the Norwegian Radiumhospital - Institute for Cancer Research. Professor Lothe has played pivotal role in over 30 years of collaboration with scientists and clinicians at medical institutions in Porto, including IPATIMUP, the Portuguese Oncology Institute, and the University of Porto. This collaboration has resulted in numerous joint scientific papers, PhD degrees, innovation projects, and exchanges of scientific and technological expertise.

The Mayor, Rui Moreira, and the President of the Minicipal Assembly, Sebestião de Azevedo, presented the medal in the presence of the municipal executive council.

Congratulations to Arina Surko, Ida Sophie Gjøstøl Strømsvåg and Joachim Jordal Moe, on successfully defending their Master's theses. Their projects were carried out at the Department of Molecular Oncology, and they attended the Master's programs at the Department of Biosciences or the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Oslo.

The Computational Oncology project group, led by Anita Sveen, has in collaboration with additional members of the Lothe group and clinical partners at OUH published a study on transcriptomic tumor heterogeneity of colorectal cancers.
Gene expression analysis of approximately 1,100 samples from primary tumors and liver metastases of 700 patients treated at OUH was used to define patterns of heterogeneous and uniform expression across tumor regions.

Heidi Pharo attended the NextGen Omics 2023 Conference in London the 9^th – 10^th of November and presented a poster about the bladder cancer research in the Lind lab, including a national multicenter clinical trial using the BladMetrix urine test for detecting recurrences. The poster received great attention, and was one of three posters achieving the Young Scientist Award (YSA) for best poster presentation. The three winners each received a £1000 travel grant, the Oxford Globals’ Omics PLUS Pass, a trophy and the opportunity to provide a 10 minutes oral presentation at the conference the following day.