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!