PhD fellowship in cancer research

Oslo University Hospital
Oslo University Hospital is Norway’s largest hospital with over 20 000 employees. It is the local hospital for most of Oslo’s population and has highly specialized care at a national level. The Department of Pathology is one out of seven departments within the Division of Laboratory medicine. It is the largest pathology department in Norway, with over 300 employees. The Department has a strong research section that is organized in seven research groups. Current research topics address cancer, immunopathology, inflammation and neurodegenerative diseases.

Oslo University Hospital is a workplace with great diversity. We believe this is crucial for solving our tasks in the best possible way. We want this diversity to be reflected among the applicants for our positions, and we encourage all qualified candidates, regardless of background, to apply!

Arbeidsoppgaver

About the position
The position is available from May 1st 2026, but both a later and earlier startup date is possible. Dr. Håvard Lindholm is principal investigator of the study. The position will be located in the laboratory of Professor Frode Jahnsen (jahnsenlab.org) at in the Department of Pathology at Oslo University Hopsital, Rikshospitalet.

This is a collaborative project between the Jahnsen team, the group of professor Hege Elisabeth Giercksky Russnes at Oslo University Hospital and the group of Professor Daniel De Carvalho at Princess Marget Cancer Centre in Toronto, Canada. All research groups are internationally leading experts in immunology, cancer, and bioinformatics.

The project aims to explore how antiviral defense pathways can be harnessed to kill breast cancer cells. Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women and novel therapies are needed to improve disease outcomes. We will sequence RNA from a cohort of more than 300 breast cancer patients, explore the activation mechanism of antiviral defense pathways in cell cultures and perform bioinformatics analysis of data. The work will be performed in a modern molecular biology lab with access to specialized equipment such as a P2 solo instrument which will be used to perform Oxford Nanopore Sequencing on site. We also have access to computational clusters which can be used for analysis.

Antiviral defense pathways can be activated if double stranded RNA (dsRNA) is expressed from our own genome. Normally, dsRNA is only present in a human cell infected with viruses and human cells have innate immune receptors that can recognize dsRNA. However, pathways dysregulated in cancer can lead to expression of repeated elements forming dsRNA. This would lead to the activation of antiviral defenses which can kill the cancer cell. Through the analysis in this project, we will hopefully understand when and where this dsRNA is expressed in cancer and how to target it for future cancer therapeutics.
For more details see this review: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405803322001911?via%3Dihub
Please get in touch if you don’t have access to the review.

Kvalifikasjoner (overskrift)

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