Research

Precision medicine provides tools to identify correctly timed and molecularly targeted therapies for cancer. These opportunities are emerging in abdominal cancer types but are under-utilized in Finnish healthcare setting due suboptimal access to profiling, inflexible drug reimbursement and difficult access to interventional trials.

Selecting right patients at the right time

Our research group takes advantage of state-of-the-art circulating cell-free DNA technologies, germline and tumor genomics, and focuses on identifying patients with the highest risk of cancer or cancer recurrence. These involve stratifying patients with hereditary germline risk variants, and patients with seemingly sporadic cancer under surveillance, for their future risk.

Profiling tumors and predicting response

Patient-derived organoids represent an excellent opportunity to develop personal 3D models of each individual’s tumor for profiling and ex vivo characterization of treatment response. With a library of organoids generated from hundreds of patients, genomic and transcriptomic profiles indicating certain clinical and ex vivo responses may be utilized to advise management. Organoid pharmacotypes predict clinical response to combination anti-cancer therapies in a black box manner, and pure epithelial component of the cancers enable high-quality molecular characterization to improve sequencing outcomes.

Silver bullets and streamlining

With help of comprehensive profiling by whole-exome sequencing, bulk and single-cell transcriptomics, and spatial immuno-omics, we identify molecular and biological vulnerabilities and features of cancers with poor prognosis. Instead of just profiling, we aim to make use of every targetable molecular alteration and beyond – even management of seemingly sporadic cancers can be improved by mapping the options within the available standard-of-care to lean on data rather than one-size-fits-all.