Department head: Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe
Deputy department head: Professor Rolf I. Skotheim
Laboratory manager: Professor Guro E. Lind
Department administrative consultants: Mona Hagen and Linda Uv Mjøen

Research groups:

Genetics	Genome Biology	Epigenetics

Project groups in the Lothe lab:

Cell signalling	Computational Oncology

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 (Link), 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 (Link). 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 K. G. Jebsen Colorectal Cancer Research Centre (led by Prof. Lothe), the OUH priority area for colorectal cancer, the Norwegian Cancer Genomics Consortium, the European network for study on Cholangiocarcinoma, and the Global Testicular Cancer Consortium.

The K.G. Jebsen Colorectal Cancer Research Centre.

Latest News

Professor Guro Elisabeth Lind, head of the Epigentics research group at the Department of Molecular Oncology, has been elected as new leader in "Forskerforbundet" - The Norwegian Association of Researchers, taking over January 1st 2019.

Lind is a former head of "Akademiet for yngre forskere" (The Young Academy of Norway) and has also been a local representative for Forskerforbundet. She will be the first female leader since the 80's, and replaces Petter Aaslestad, who has been in charge of the Research Association for the last six years (two periods).

"I was very much in doubt, first and foremost because I am an active researcher with a research group and exciting projects. But I am also actively engaged in research policy and could not say no to this exciting challenge", Lind says to Khrono.

The vast majority of primary prostate cancers are multifocal. The individual tumors within the prostate gland are known to have different aggressiveness and develop independently of one another, but little has been known about their genetic relationship.

Marthe Løvf and colleagues have performed the first large in-depth genomic heterogeneity study of primary prostate cancer and the results were published in the recognized journal European Urology earlier this month. The researchers performed exome sequencing of 89 tumor foci from 41 patients and demonstrated convincingly that the different foci within the same patient only exceptionally have any somatic gene mutations in common.

Postdoctor Andreas M. Hoff in the Skotheim group at the Department of Molecular Oncology spent a year of his postdoc in the lab of Matthew Meyerson at the Broad Institute and Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, USA. As shared first-author, he publishes together with his colleagues at the Meyerson lab in the prestigous journal Cell (impact factor 30).

Research from the Department of Molecular Oncology has recently been profiled in three popular science articles.

In an interview in Apollon, Rolf Skotheim discusses why some healthy cells turn into cancer cells.

Bjarne Johannessen and Kaja C. G. Berg have written about colorectal cancer cell lines in the magazine BestPractice. BestPractice is a Norwegian medical journal which focuses on oncology and hematology.

In the same journal, Anita Sveen has written about tumor heterogeneity in metastatic colorectal cancer.

The Epigenetics Group at the Department of Molecular Oncology, headed by Guro E. Lind, has developed a robust internal control for DNA methylation analyses by droplet digital PCR (ddPCR). The findings have recently been published in the journal Clinical Epigenetics. First author is Heidi Dietrichson Pharo.

In two recent publications (Eide PW et al. Sci Rep; Sveen A*, Bruun J* et al. Clin Cancer Res), scientists in the Lothe lab., Department of Molecular Oncology, have identified novel potential treatment strategies for colorectal cancer (CRC), guided by the consensus molecular subtypes (CMS). Combining algorithm development, for translation of CMS classification to preclinical models, with drug screening of classified cell lines and patient-derived xenografts (PDXs) in collaboration with the Finnish Institute for Molecular Medicine and Vall d´Hebron Institute of Oncology, a potential to overcome chemoresistance in the poor prognostic CMS4-mesenchymal group was identified by combination therapy with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and HSP90 inhibitors.

Contact information

Department of Molecular Oncology, Institute for Cancer Research
Oslo University Hospital HE - Norwegian Radium Hospital
Mail address: P. O. Box 4953 Nydalen, NO-0424 Oslo, Norway
Street address: Norwegian Radium Hospital, Montebello
Phone: +47 2278 1728, Switchboard: +47 2293 4000, Fax: +47 2278 1745
E-mail: ragnhild.a.lothe@rr-research.no