The project was led by Kjetil Taskén and Jorrit Enserink at Oslo University Hospital and Arnoldo Frigessi and Anna Smajdor at University of Oslo, had several affiliated clinical collaborators and 20M NOK in funding from the RCN DLN programme. PINpOINT ended 31.12.2023. Its goal was to investigate whether predicting which cancer therapies would be effective before administering them to the patient is possible. They aimed to do this by developing a comprehensive pipeline incorporating computational predictive tools to identify tailored treatments for individual hematological cancer patients and to model patient outcomes.
Results achieved: assisting clinical decision-making
The project worked with three diseases: acute myeloid leukemia, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and multiple myeloma and has notably developed and documented validated methods for cancer drug sensitivity screening, computational tools to process and analyse the data and methods and tools to predict treatment outcomes and drug synergies. This research will ultimately assist in clinical decision-making of personalized treatment for cancer patients.
PINpOINT has published some 30 scientific papers (more coming), one patent has been filed, the principal investigators and project staff have given more than 80 talks and presentations in scientific meetings. They also report around 50 popular publications and media items, disseminating the PINpOINT work to the general public. The PhD student employed on the project has defended his Thesis, and several PhD students on associated projects have either defended or will soon defend their Theses. Several postdocs have been trained, and younger research scientists and PIs (notably Manuela Zucknick, Alvaro Köhn-Luque, Sigrid Skånland, and Pilar Ayuda-Durán) have developed their careers with excellent trajectories over the period.
Recent publication
Of the papers published, the most recent (February 2024, and therefore not in the final report to the RCN) is from PINpOINT researcher Sigrid Skånland and her postdoc Aleksandra Urban, who co-author a paper in Science. Their involvement resulted from Skånland’s research stay at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York in the fall of 2022. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi5798