Our research
My team has established and is responsible for a sample- and analysis process at KI/SciLife to enable biomarker driven randomized clinical trials and prospective research projects. The process encompasses reception and storage of biomaterial, subsequent processing for Illumina sequencing and analysis using an in-house developed bioinformatics pipeline and curation software. The setup is made possible through collaboration with KI biobank and Clinical Genomics at SciLife lab. Since 2016 >5500 samples from >50 hospitals in 6 European countries has been analysed and reported. The main studies have been ALASCCA and ProBio. The first result from the ProBio trial was published in Nature Medicine and the ALASCCA trial met its primary endpoint which was recently presented at ASCO-GI.
The sample- and analysis process has been optimized, enabling a two-week turnover of results even to trial sites in other countries such as Belgium. Consequently, the weekly team activities have strong similarities to a routine diagnostic setting with tight timelines and uptime requirements. To give patients in clinical routine access to improved diagnostics and state-of-the art genomics the iPCM (implementation of Personalized Cancer Medicine) project was launched in late 2020 with the goal to implement the research infrastructure for genomic profiling in clinical routine at Clinical Pathology, Karolinska Hospital. Hitherto, genomic analysis of prostate cancer and ovarian cancer has been implemented as routine diagnostic tests with many more yet to come.
Collectively, the large prospective research projects provides a unique resource for cancer genomics assay development and retrospective biomarker discovery projects.