November 23^rd at 12:00
On-site event
Presidentti auditorium
Autumn 2023 program

Prof. Olivier de Wever, Cancer Research Institute Ghent, University of Ghent, Belgium
Exploring patient-derived models to advance personalized oncological care
Host: Jyrki Heino (jyrki.heino@utu.fi)

Coffee and sandwich at 11:45, first come first served!

Six students and early-career postdocs are welcome to have a lunch in restaurant Mauno and discuss with Prof. de Wever after the seminar. This is a great possibility to learn hosting skills in friendly environment and create connections for future. Every student is welcome to join, in spite of which research group they belong to. BioCity Turku will offer the lunch.

If you got interested, please send an email to biocityturku@bioscience.fi

Metastasis is the main cause of death for cancer patients. To colonize distant organs, cancer cells communicate with their environment to overcome obstacles such as infiltration of foreign tissues and adaptation to supportive niches. Although metastasis is an inefficient process; we currently fail to understand it, to prevent it and to have durable responses. The group of prof. Olivier De Wever at the Laboratory of Experimental Cancer Research dedicates its resources to improve the understanding of the communicative determinants between cancer cells and their host tissue. The results of this research can be clustered in two topics: i) 3D cell culture models (such as spheroids) and patient-derived models (ex vivo and xenograft) to study metastasis-associated cellular activities. ii) The identification of adaptive communication skills between cancer cells and host cells (cancer-associated fibroblast, CAF) and its impact on cancer management strategies

Selected publications

Post-operative minimal residual disease models to study metastatic relapse in soft-tissue sarcoma patient-derived xenografts. Clinical Translational Medicine, 2023

MISpheroID: a knowledgebase and transparency tool for minimum information in spheroid identity. Nature Methods 2021

Splenic Hematopoietic and Stromal Cells in Cancer Progression. Cancer Res 2021

General information

• You can download and save all the autumn 2023 FoS-seminars to your calendar from here: https://seafile.utu.fi/d/44a70f80ac1e46a9ad0a/
• Registration is not needed, participation list is circulated in the audience
• If you are a student and later wish to get a certificate of attendance from the Frontier of Science seminars, print out the seminar diary and after the seminar ask the BioCity coordinator to sign it https://seafile.utu.fi/d/44a70f80ac1e46a9ad0a/
• Please note that any audio or video recording of the seminars is strictly forbidden.
• Autumn 2023 FoS image credits to Anna-Mari Haapanen-Saaristo: Part of anoxia study of Eutardigrade species Macrobiotus Ripperi labelled with commercial fluorescent dyes, image acquired on 3i CSU-W1 Spinning disk with 40x objective