Research projects

PerCaThe

PerCaThe

Personalised cancer therapy

Highlights 2021

During 2021, the PerCaThe consortium, with expertise in oncology, cancer biology, genomics, bioinformatics, medical imaging, ethics, mathematics and statistics, has concluded with a positive conviction that convergence among all these fields is possible and necessary to make progress in personalized cancer medicine. Our novel and strong results allow using high-throughput drug screenings to find alternative therapies to individual patients, predicting combinations of drugs that have synergistic effects, better characterizing individual tumors by identifying hypoxic regions or deciphering their clonal compositions, predicting treatment outcomes based on the patient’s genomic profiles and running personalized simulations of drug treatment in a computer to find optimal treatments. We have also studied ethical and philosophical implications of our multidisciplinary endeavors in the context of responsible research and innovation. Collectively, this piece of work moves our teams, and particularly their newer generations, towards the forefront of personalized cancer medicine internationally.

One highlight of 2021 has been the finalization of a cross-disciplinary manuscript that involved multiple consortium members during several years [Köhn-Luque et al. bioRxiv 2022.01.17.476604] The study proposes a mathematical and statistical method, called DECIPHER, to infer the clonal composition of a cancer sample along with the drug sensitivity of each clone. We expect that DECIPHER will contribute to the administration of more precise and personalized cancer treatments.

For us, the added value of being part of a transdisciplinary centre was to obtain guidance and support on relevant topics to our researchers and their goals, that not commonly found elsewhere.

Number of scientific publications 2021: 33

Project overview

Project lead: Arnoldo Frigessi and Kjetil Taskén
Institution: University of Oslo
Partners: Oslo University Hospital
Funding: UiO:Life Science

Research group

The goal of the project is to develop a new approach to cancer treatment. The multidisciplinary team will combine mathematical modelling, statistical methods, patient data and drug screening on patient-derived cancer cells. The new methods and implementation will be focused towards patients with breast and lung cancer, as well as lymph cell malignancies. In addition, the researchers will investigate the ethical, societal and regulatory consequences of the project.

Innovation: The project will develop and implement a novel approach to cancer treatment, in close collaboration with key industrial partners. 

The project is a convergence environment funded by UiO: Life Science

Project website.

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