The Multidisciplinary Cancer Research community builds upon the translational cancer research cluster within the 91 and Kuopio University Hospital Cancer Center, in which clinical and basic researchers join forces to fight cancer. We bring together the expertise on the molecular mechanisms, genomics and quantitative imaging features of cancer, with clinical understanding of the diagnostics and treatment. Our goal is to bring personalized medicine into cancer care. In addition, our research covers the health economics challenges caused by cancer. In data science, we focus on detecting anomalies in cancer sample data, such as images, omics data, and registries. We are creating algorithms that can learn from this data to identify and predict risk of cancer and outcome factors. The Biobank of Eastern Finland and Kuopio data lake serve the research community with high quality sample collections and clinical data.

Different genomics and imaging techniques can be used to profile cancer samples. These produce large amounts of data that require computational data analysis. We use statistics and machine learning methods to study the properties of the cancers, such as recurrent mutations or immune cell infiltration.
Merja Heinäniemi
Professor

The main initiatives
Cellular and molecular mechanisms of treatment resistance and the development of cancer
- We study the molecular mechanisms of cancer to identify new drug targets and biomarkers
- We model the cancer treatment responses using genome-epigenome-wide research and molecular imaging tools
- We investigate the effects of drugs on cancer gene regulatory programs and protein-protein and protein-gene interactions
Prevention and clinical outcome within a defined population
- Collaboration with FICAN-East
- Breast cancer prevention: AI-assisted analysis
- Lymphoma and leukaemia patient care
- Precision radiotherapy
- Data science: Detecting exceptional subgroups from combined bio bank and clinical data.
Intelligent drug targeting based on applied data science in multidisciplinary oncology
- Drug models
- Clinical genomics data analysis tools in cancer
Learn more about us
News and events
Cancer research news
Upcoming events
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12
May
2025
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14
May
2025
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15
May
2025
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15
May
2025
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15
May
2025
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16
May
2025