Finnish Brain Tumor Research Association

Last Spring I became a board member and treasurer of the Finnish Brain Tumor Research Association (FIBTRA). It is approximately a 5-years' old association and has organized yearly meetings in October/November in different places. In 2017, I was honored to be one of the speakers in this yearly event in Turku. But this year it was impossible to continue the tradition, so we decided to try short virtual satellite symposia that will be streamlined several times over the year. The first mini-symposium called "Tackling Brain Tumor Heterogeneity with Single-Cell Transcriptomics" was held on last Wednesday successfully and I think we are now even more eager to organize more of these events in the future. Dr. Vadim Le Joncour, our board member from Prof. Pirjo Lakkonen's research group, made a huge job in organizing the first symposium, so thank you Vadim, job well done!

We were honored to host Prof. Mario Suvà (Massachusetts General Hospital, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, USA) as a keynote lecture on his groundbreaking discovery recently published in Cell (link), revealing that glioblastoma tumor cells exhibit different phenotypic states with consequences on the tumor plasticity and progression. He also shared with us ongoing investigations on other types of brain cancers, including pediatric brain tumors and medulloblastoma.

We also had a lecture by Dr. Toshiro Hara (from Prof. Suvà laboratory), who is the main contributor in the discovery of the phenotypic states that brain tumor cells exhibit. He told us the story leading to this discovery and the perspectives offered by the single-cell transcriptomics technology. In addition, he presented very recent data on the glioblastoma-immune cell interactions at the single-cell resolution. 

Lastly, Mrs. Kaiyang Zhang (University of Helsinki) shared with us her experience with the computational analysis of large datasets of patient tumor cells. During this live interactive session, the analysis on the screen was performed, while she commented on the methodology.

 

Here are the webpages of the FIBTRA (link) for more information and I hope you join us as a member for future events! 

Visiting Lodz in October 2019

It is almost a year now when I visit my collaborator Dr. Magdalena Markowicz-Piasecka at the Medical University of Lodz. It was a very nice visit, Magdalena had organized everything for me, so I really felt appreciated. The lecture that I gave was probably for the biggest audience ever, although the students were quite shy to continue the discussion afterward. But like I was told, they don't have that many international visitors too often giving lectures or seminars to the students.

It was also amazing to see how old and new world were nicely mixed up at the university! The city of Lodz was also a mixture of old and new, but very nice place, indeed! And this time of year, when coming from rainy and dark Finland, it almost felt like a summer to me, despite of the one foggy day!

This year, the visit would have not been possible due to COVID-19, so I'm glad we able to do it finally and I think we got many new ideas and nice discussion how to take our mutual research to the next level. So Thank you Magdalena, one more time!

And specking of our mutual research, our latest metformin paper was accepted and came out in Phamaceuticals-journal this week, so congratulations, team! (the link to the paper)

 

Half-virtual Public Ph.D. Thesis Defence

Yesterday, I attended for the first time for a Ph.D. thesis public defense, in which the opponent was online. It was still allowed to have the Ph.D. student and custos in the lecture room and also a limited number of audience (less than 50), but we all needed to wear the face-masks, even though the places in which we sat, were like 5 meters away from each other. But I must say that everything went very smoothly and the student, Prasanthi, well-defended her Ph.D. thesis and we had a lovely "Karonkka"-dinner party afterward! So congratulations Prasanthi and Thank you one more time! 

 

This week has been a socially very active week, since we had also our Faculty's "Pre-Christmas party" or it was more like activity afternoon, on Wednesday. We were lucky, the weather was perfect and sunny for outdoor sports. Our task was to pick approximately 13 orienteering controls around Kuopio Väinölänniemi and Rönö, and then answer to the tricky questions. So basically we walked for 1.5 h and according to my activity bracelet, we took more than 8000 steps. On that day I probably did my greatest score ever, over 20 000 steps! Anyway, after the orienteering, we had a late lunch outside and I think I saw smiles on everyone's faces. It was a really nice social event with all COVID-19 precautions taken into account!