Department head: Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe
Deputy department head: Professor Rolf I. Skotheim
Laboratory manager: Professor Guro E. Lind
Department administrative consultant: Ikram Mahnin

The year 2020 at Dept Molecular Oncology
Scientific achievements at Dept Molecular Oncology in 2019

Research groups

Genetics	Genome Biology	Epigenetics

Project groups

Computational Oncology	Cancer Informatics	Statistical Epigenomics

Cell Signalling

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.

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 from cell biology to translational research, including also active clinical research collaborations, and we have a broad range of advanced technologies established in-lab. The department scientists are inventors of several biomedical patents and active innovation projects.

Lothe lab – genetics, genomics, cell signaling, colorectal cancer, MPNST, tumor heterogeneity, pharmacogenomics, biomarkers

Skotheim lab – genome biology, transcript variation, tumor heterogeneity, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, bioinformatics

Lind lab – epigenetics, genetics, GI-cancers, bladder cancer, early detection, monitoring

Affiliations

All three 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, 59 MSc/PhD degrees have successfully been defended.

The research groups are partners of the Oslo University Hospital strategic research area - Precision colorectal cancer therapy, colorectal cancer COST – actions, The Global Testicular Cancer Consortium, The European network for study on Cholangiocarcinoma, a European multicenter study on MPNST (malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor), The Norwegian Esophageal Cancer Consortium

Latest News

On October 15^th 2021, Kristina Totland Carm successfully defended her thesis “Genomic aberrations and molecular subtypes in multifocal prostate cancer” for the PhD degree at the Medical Faculty, University of Oslo. She also gave a trial lecture on the given topic: “Multiparametric MRI-guided biopsies in prostate cancer diagnostics – challenges on the road towards radiogenomics”.

The adjudication committee included first opponent, Professor Ian Mills, University of Oxford, UK; second opponent, Professor Karl-Henning Kalland, University of Bergen, and chair of the evaluation committee was Associate Professor Stig Müller, University of Oslo. Chair of the defence was Associate Professor June Helen Myklebust, University of Oslo.

Principal Supervisor was Rolf I. Skotheim, and co-supervisors were Marthe Løvf, Andreas Hoff and Ragnhild A. Lothe. 

Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a progressive chronic liver disease associated with increased risk of cholangiocarcinoma; a highly deadly malignancy that arises in the bile ducts. Due to nonspecific presenting features and overlapping findings in malignant and benign disease progression in PSC, the diagnostic accuracy for cholangiocarcinoma in PSC is low. Consequently, cholangiocarcinoma is commonly detected at advanced stage where most patients have a poor chance of surviving, making cholangiocarcinoma the most common cause of death among patients with PSC.

Project group leaders Anita Sveen and Bjarne Johannessen at Department of Molecular Oncology at the Institute for Cancer Research are 1^st and 2^nd authors of a major work presenting the ”expressed mutation dose” as a determinant of the functional consequences of mutations in colorectal cancer.

The article - entitled "The expressed mutational landscape of microsatellite stable colorectal cancers" is published in the journal Genome Medicine.

The multidisciplinary team of the K.G.Jebsen Colorectal Cancer Research Centre publishes a novel gene expression-based classification of metastatic colorectal cancer.
PhD student S. Hossein Moosavi in Anita Sveen’s project group at the Dept. of Molecular Oncology at the Institute for Cancer Research is 1st author of this paper published in Genome Medicine.
This is the first large study of multi-metastatic gene expression profiling of colorectal cancer liver metastases, and the new metastasis-oriented subtyping framework showed prognostic relevance in the context of tumor heterogeneity. 

Three Oslo University Hospital scientists received prestigous awards for their outstanding research on August 27th. The major prize - the "Excellent Researcher Award" - went to Ragnhild A. Lothe. Lasse Pihlstrøm and Marina Vietri both received the "Early Career Award".
The prize money - 300.000 and 150.000 NOK respectively - is earmarked for research activities.

The ceremony was streamed and is available via YouTube.

Anita Sveen (39) – senior researcher and project group leader at Institute for Cancer Research – was on December 16th awarded the prize Researcher-of-the-Year from the leadership at ICR for her outstanding scientific contributions. The award of 100 000 NOK is financed by the Radium Hospital Foundation (Radiumhospitalets legater) and is a personal scholarship for stimulating further excellence in research. 

In June, Tuva Høst Brunsell (MD) digitally defended her PhD “ Heterogeneity of prognostic biomarkers in colorectal liver metastases”, Institute for Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo. The thesis includes three papers (Brunsell et al., Clin Colorectal Cancer 2020; Brunsell et al., Eur J Surg Oncol 2019; Berg*, Brunsell* et al., submitted).

On September the 4th, Christer Anker Andreassen, digitally defended his MSc, Institute of Biosciences, University of Oslo. “The functional and clinical impact of the E3 Ubiquitin ligase NEDD4 in colorectal cancer and its role in regulating PTEN and P53”.

On September the 11th, Mikael Ravndal, defended his MSc, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. "Algorithms for exploring heterogeneity in prostate cancer patients from RNA-seq data".

By examining vulnerabilities in colorectal cancer, Jørgen Smeby, Kushtrim Kryeziu, and colleagues demonstrated the efficacy of PARP inhibitors for a subgroup of colorectal cancer cell lines in a recent paper in EBioMedicine (The Lancet’s open access).

The cancer patient’s own drug sensitivity model: researchers from the Lothe lab and collaborators recently published a paper in Clinical Cancer Research describing ex vivo patient-derived organoids from colorectal liver metastases in a heterogeneity context. 

Drs. Jarle Bruun, Kushtrim Kryeziu and Peter W. Eide (photo) were shared 1st authors , and have established the PDO lineages and drug screen analyses.