New Lundbeck Foundation Fellow will improve diagnoses for cancer
More knowledge about so-called circular RNA could improve the ability to make diagnoses that are more accurate and predict how the individual patient will respond to certain types of cancer drugs. As a Lundbeck Fellow Lasse Sommer Kristensen receives DKK 10 million from the Lundbeck Foundation and will be affiliated with the Department of Biomedicine from January 2020.
Circular RNA is the cornerstone of Lasse Sommer Kristensen’s fellowship. RNA is a molecule primarily described as a transporter of genetic information within our cells and, as such, it helps ensure that the necessary proteins are produced.
Circular RNA plays an important role in the regulation of proteins in tumours, and Lasse Sommer Kristensen will be studying cells from various forms of leukaemia and lymphoma to see how much circular RNA there is in these cells compared with healthy cells. No one has done this yet for these diseases.
The primary aim is to gain a better understanding of what goes wrong inside the cancer cells, at a molecular level. Moreover, Lasse Sommer Kristensen hopes that, with this new knowledge, we will be able to make our diagnoses more precise and to predict how individual patients will react to certain types of cancer medicine – before they start taking it.
With the Lundbeck Foundation’s funding, Lasse Sommer Kristensen can establish his own research group at the Department of Biomedicine starting 1 January 2020.
Contact
Assistant professor Lasse Sommer Kristensen
Aarhus University, Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics
Mail: lasse@mbg.au.dk
This article is based on press material from the Lundbeck Foundation.