Department head: Professor Ragnhild A. Lothe
Deputy department head: Professor Rolf I. Skotheim
Laboratory manager: Ina Andrassy Eilertsen
Administrative consultant: Linda Uv Mjøen

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

Computational Oncology

Cancer Informatics

Project groups

Cell Signalling

Functional Precision Oncology

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.

Among the group leaders three are Professors and one is Assoc. Professor at the University of Oslo affiliated with the Institute for Clinical Medicine, the Institute for Biosciences and the Institute for Informatics. We continue our focus on education and early career development (LINK) and since the establishment of Dept Mol Oncology in 2006, 41 PhDs and 52 MScs have successfully defended their degrees.

Summary annual highlights – 2024: Young talents

Latest News

Training and supervision of students has over time been a key focus for the Department of Molecular Oncology, recently acknowledged in the Evaluation of Medicine and Health 2023-24 conducted by the Research Council of Norway.

This year four Master students defended their degrees at four different academic institutions.

Group leader Rolf I. Skotheim in the Department of Molecular Oncology has spent the last week running from Oslo to Bergen, completing the 500 km ultra race Oslo - Bergen Trail.

Oslo Bergen Trail is regarded as a highly challenging endurance event, where participants traverse a variety of forest and mountain terrains in hopes of reaching Bergen after several days. The race was organized for the first time in 2021, and has gained popularity and established itself as one of the most extreme ultra-challenges in Scandinavia.

The race is open for both individual participants and teams consisting of 2-3 participants. A total of 213 participants had signed up for the race which started in Oslo on July 3rd, and approximately 50% were able to complete the race.

The establishment of new groups in Computational Oncology and Cancer Informatics is in line with the ICR strategy to strengthen efforts in systems cancer biomedicine and integrate such competence at the departmental level. It is also in line with the Department’s long-term strategy to recruit senior scientists with complementary competencies, serving our joint research goals.

In January, the UiO:Life Science board decided to include five new teams into the SPARK Norway innovation program. This program is designed to facilitate the transformation of research ideas into tangible solutions in the health-related life sciences sector. Since its inception in 2017, it has successfully fostered the creation of several businesses and companies, all grounded in fundamental and translational life science research. Notably, the ProClass project, a key component of the prostate cancer research portfolio within the Department of Molecular Oncology, is among the projects selected to join the SPARK innovation program for 2025.

Kushtrim Kryeziu recently turned 40 years. He came to Oslo from Vienna as a EU- post doc in 2016. He joined the Lothe lab and started his work on tumor organoids  from colorectal cancer liver metastases. Today he is responsible for the preclinical functional oncology team and he has built a major “living biobank” of > 300 patient derived metastases organoids. He was last year supported by the Norwegian Cancer Society with an open call grant to pursue his research and the project was profiled this month in Amta (in Norwegian), his local newspaper after settling down in Nesodden.

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.