News regarding Oslo Cancer Cluster

Experts advocate for lung cancer screening

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Lung cancer experts emphasised the need for improved screening protocols to enhance early detection and reduce mortality rates across the Nordic region.

Specialists convened at the “Lung Cancer Symposium – Early Diagnosis & Screening, Benchmarking the Nordics,” organised by Oslo Cancer Cluster, NTNU, and Levanger Hospital last week, to discuss the latest advancements and challenges in lung cancer screening. The event focused on the importance of early detection and the need for standardised screening practices across the Nordic countries.

Watch the symposium:

The importance of early detection

Presenters at the symposium underscored that lung cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer mortality worldwide.

According to Oluf Dimitri Røe, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Clinical and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, NTNU/Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Department of Oncology, Levanger Hospital: “Lung cancer has the highest incidence and mortality rate globally,” which highlights the importance of effective screening.

Research shows that screening with low-dose CT scans can reduce mortality by 20-24%. However, there is no universal consensus on the best screening method, which remains a significant challenge in implementing these programs.

Current screening practices and their limitations

David Baldwin, MD, PhD, Professor, Nottingham University Hospital, shared insights into implementing the targeted lung health check program in the UK, which has shown success in early detection. “We’ve shown that screening can be both effective and cost-efficient,” Baldwin noted. The UK model has detected thousands of cases at earlier stages, particularly in high-risk groups, demonstrating the potential impact of targeted screening.

However, identifying the most appropriate population for screening remains a challenge. Røe pointed out that using the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) criteria would mean “excluding 74% of those who will get lung cancer,” indicating that current selection methods may not be sufficiently inclusive.

Addressing smoking among young people

Smoking was identified as a significant risk factor, with concerns raised about its prevalence among young people. Røe noted that “more than half of adolescent smoking is attributable to watching smoking in movies.” This suggests a need for targeted interventions to prevent smoking initiation among younger populations, which could reduce lung cancer incidence over time.

Innovative approaches to smoking cessation

Finland introduced an innovative approach to support smoking cessation through a mobile app. Jussi Koivunen, MD, PhD, Professor, Department of Oncology and Radiotherapy, The Oulu University Hospital, reported that the app helped a substantial proportion of participants quit smoking, with 20% of users becoming non-smokers within six months. These results indicate that digital tools can be an effective addition to lung cancer prevention strategies.

Next steps for the Nordic region

The symposium highlighted the need for tailored lung cancer screening programs across the Nordic countries. The Norwegian representative stressed the importance of adapting approaches to each country’s healthcare system, stating, “We have to learn from others, and we have to tailor every screening program to our country.”

The discussions at the symposium indicate that a coordinated approach to lung cancer screening, alongside smoking prevention and cessation initiatives, could significantly improve early detection and treatment outcomes in the Nordic countries.

AI – a game changer in cancer

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Artificial intelligence brings endless opportunities, but can it contribute to tackling healthcare challenges caused by a rapid aging population and an increase in complex disease?

This question was asked at a recent conference titled Intelligent Health, organised by Oslo Met, Oslo Cancer Cluster and Akershus University Hospital. The event brought together over 200 live participants and 100 on streaming, including students, academics, and practitioners from across a number of institutions and companies, with the purpose of discussing, understanding, and sharing.

The talks covered a wide range of topics, from using AI in the development of personalised health, to prevention and treatment of different diseases. Several presentations focused on AI solutions in the oncology sphere, including prevention, drug development and treatment optimisation.

Watch the recording of the conference here: The Intelligent Health conference 2024 – FilMet (oslomet.no)

Creating digital twins

Arnoldo Frigessi, professor at the University of Oslo, presented Digital twin for personalized treatment: example from breast cancer. Frigessi outlined an “in-silico approach” to personalised treatment. By using all available data of the patient, he described how to make a digital twin and simulating different treatment options.

“The fundamental idea is to produce copies of the unique patients on a computer. When we have a lot of copies of the patient we can treat each copy with a drug or a different dose and compare them in-silico on a computer to see which one of the drugs works better. This is the in silico approach to personalised treatment,” Frigessi stated.

The simulation is still far from being used in a clinical setting, due to time constraints, but gives a view of what personalised cancer treatment may look like in the future.

Arnoldo Frigessi, professor at the University of Oslo. Photo: Thea Larsen Ørneseidet, Oslo Met

Improving screening strategies

Oluf Dimitri Røe, professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, covered the clinician’s perspective: The role of AI in predicting lung cancer. Røe introduced how a new machine-learning model can improve the selection of participants to lung cancer screening.

“Yearly screening with CT scan could reduce the mortality of lung cancer with 20%, however, in the NLST study they found that only 26% of everyone that got lung cancer had been included in the study. This was due to the smoking criteria they used. So we need new models for selecting people for lung cancer screening.

“One of the machine learning models is the Hunt Lung Cancer Risk Model, which was published in 2018. We used backwards feature selection on 36 variables that we picked out from the Hunt data bank. The main thing is that we could with a simple calculator get a very high AUC value, higher than the PLCO in our population,” commented Røe.

Predicting treatment outcome

Tero Aittokallio, group leader of Computational Systems Medicine in Cancer, Dept. of Cancer Genetics, Oslo University Hospital gave the researcher’s perspective: AI for treatment optimization in pancreatic cancer and hematological malignancies. Aittokallio talked about building multimodal AI to predict treatment outcome in pancreatic cancer.

“This is based on data that we collected in a Horizon 2020 project for the last four years. Most of the time has been spent collecting data from different hospitals in Europe, such as liquid biopsies and surgery. We are using genomics, pathology, MRI imaging, radiology, and then the idea is that we are combining this data using AI models and using this information to select the right treatment for the individual patients.”

Tero Aittokallio, group leader, Oslo University Hospital. Photo: Thea Larsen Ørneseidet, Oslo Met

Identifying new drug targets

Amine Namouchi, Principal Scientist in Nykode Therapeutics, represented the industry’s perspective with The role of AI in creating personalized cancer vaccines. Namouchi described how Nykode has developed AI models to detect novel drug targets for development.

“For the case of cancer vaccine development, our starting point is of course the patient. From the patient, we have a blood sample and a tumour biopsy sample. We perform the DNA and the RNA sequencing, and HLA typing, to know exactly what MHC class I are expressed at the surface of this particular patient. Then we apply our method and our algorithm to select and rank those neoantigens, and the platform is called NeoSELECT,” said Namouchi.

Namouchi then described how the company identifies the neoantigens that bind to the MHC molecule, by using an artificial neural network.

Amine Namouchi, Principal Scientist in Nykode Therapeutics. Photo: Thea Larsen Ørneseidet, Oslo Met

Oslo Cancer Cluster

Together at Nordic Life Science Days

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1400 participants from 30 countries gathered in Malmö, Sweden for this year’s Nordic Life Science Days, 18-19 September. The Norwegian ecosystem shared a pavilion at the conference.

The two-day conference is the largest Nordic partnering conference dedicated to the life science industry and is organised annually. It started in 2013 to create a unique place to do business, and Oslo Cancer Cluster has been a partner and supporter of the conference since the beginning. For several years, Oslo Cancer Cluster has organised a common pavilion with the other Norwegian stakeholders to promote Norwegian life science companies in the Nordics.

“Oslo Cancer Cluster helps to assure a Norwegian presence at Nordic Life Science Days each year. By working together with fellow clusters, public and private partners, with support from The Norwegian Embassies in Denmark and Sweden, and Innovation Norway, the collective effort provides valuable access to wider networks, expertise, and opportunities for companies to innovate. It also strengthens Norwegian interests across the Nordics and helps each of us make a positive impact. Together, we can make a difference”, said Charlotte Wu Homme, Head of Membership and Events at Oslo Cancer Cluster.

 

A large group of people in front of a white house with blue skies above.

A kick-start to the conference was held the day prior at the Residence of the Norwegian Ambassador in Copenhagen. Oslo Cancer Cluster was honoured that Ambassador Katja Nordgaard hosted the event and spoke on the importance of cooperation and innovation. Photo: Innovation Norway in Denmark

 

Woman in front of camera in a video setting.

Katja Vetvik, CEO of the Norwegian start-up and Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator company Thelper, was interviewed by Oslo Business Region during the conference. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

Bjørn Klem, CEO of Norwegian start-up and Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator company Adjutec Pharma, gave a company presentation at NLSDays this year. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

Man on a stage in front of screen and audinece.

Torbjørn Furuseth, CEO of the start-up and Oslo Cancer Cluster Incubator company DoMore Diagnostics, participated in the Nordic Star 2024 Pitch Competition during the first day of the conference. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

People in front of a conference stand saying "Norway Pioneering Sustainable Health Solutions - Together!"

The Norwegian pavilion at NLSDays 2024 was home to the entire Norwegian life science ecosystem, Team Norway. The partners on the stand were Oslo Cancer Cluster, The Life Science Cluster, Norway Health Tech, Norwegian Smart Care Cluster, LMI, NorTrials, Inven2, Oslo Business Region, Innovation Norway, and the Norwegian embassies in Copenhagen and Stockholm, as well as industry partners Curida Diatec, Theradex Oncology, Precision Health AI. Photo: Oslo Cancer Cluster

 

NLSDays is owned and organised by SwedenBIO. Next year’s conference will be in Gothenburg. Learn more at www.nlsdays.com.

 

Health – the next alerted crisis?

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New personalised treatments, investments in prevention, and integrating primary and specialist health services could contribute to averting a future health crisis.

“If we love Norway, we must also dare to change it.”

This statement was made by Alfred Bjørlo, parliamentary representative for The Liberal Party (Norway), at a recent meeting titled Fremtidens kreftbehandling during Arendalsuka. The topic for discussion was whether Norwegian health services are prepared for future challenges.

Bjørlo said: “We are going into a revolution in cancer care, from broad cancer treatments for big patient groups to precision treatment for individual cancer patients. It is a happy situation to be in, to have come so far in research and development of new treatments that we can save lives. But the revolution in the cancer field forces us to also re-evaluate how we rig the system.”

A higher demand

The Health Personnel Commission has concluded that with the changing demography, the future demand for health services will be larger than the resources available. They have suggested several measures to combat the crisis, including organisational changes, implementing novel technologies and increasing the number of health workers.

The newly appointed State Secretary Usman A. Mushtaq for the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services commented in the debate:

“There is no doubt that the demographic development, the technology development and all other great changes happening in our society affect how we think about future health challenges and opportunities. At the same time, we must not forget that people’s expectations of us are also steadily increasing. Preserving the trust in the health services is incredibly important. We see challenges that will need tough prioritisation and health is something we will continue to prioritise.”

Cancer prevention & climate crisis

Mushtaq continued: “If we look at cancer, a disease area where we invest huge resources, there are more cancer cases and more survivors, but prevention does not get enough attention. Globally, it is estimated that a third of cancer cases are preventable. We can prevent cancer through lifestyle choices and vaccines. We cannot afford not to invest money in this area.”

Bjørlo agreed: “There are many things we must do in the field of prevention. For example, there are new dietary recommendations coming on Thursday. This also affects environmental and climate politics. A lot of this is connected. We need to make the right changes on the individual and system level.”

Gunnar Bovim, Head of the Health Personnel Commission, Chairman of the Board in the Norwegian Research Council and advisor in NTNU, emphasised seeing the health services more as one whole:

“It is important to see the whole patient pathway. A larger investment at the start can make the patient healthy enough to return to work. This has an enormous value.”

The health services as one whole

One model coming from Denmark is to have better integration between the primary and the specialist health services. Norway is characterized by many small municipalities, which makes the distances from university hospitals to small municipalities longer.

Bjørlo commented: “We have worked actively to reform the municipalities and make them larger. These are extremely challenging processes. There is too much silo thinking in Norway’s health services. A lot of amazing pilot work is happening in municipalities and health organisations, but we are too bad at putting them into the system and getting an effect. This is our responsibility as politicians, to dare to be clear about it. We need to be ready to make quite large structural changes.”

Mushtaq commented: “It is a good premise to have long-term investments in health. It is always more ‘sexy’ to invest in specialist health services, while primary health services often come in second place. Some will say that the specialist services get too much media attention, and it is up to us politicians to also prioritize the primary health services.”

The meeting was led by Thomas Axelsen from the Norwegian Cancer Society. You can watch a recording of the entire event (in Norwegian) below:

The Norwegian news outlets Medwatch and Healthtalk also covered the event and published articles in Norwegian here:

 

Fremtidens kreftbehandling is a meeting series organized by Oslo Cancer Cluster, The Norwegian Pharmaceutical Industry Association (LMI), The Norwegian Cancer Society, AstraZeneca Norway and MSD Norway.