The LEO Foundation Award 2016 – Silver Award
Grantee: Dr. Thomas Wiesner
Amount: DKK 500,000
Grant category: LEO Foundation Awards
Year: 2016
Geography: Austria
Presented to Dr. Thomas Wiesner. Dr. Wiesner is breaking new ground to find new mechanism-based cancer therapies. Following medical school, Dr. Wiesner wrote his thesis on the genomic aberrations of cutaneous lymphoma and completed his residency in dermatology at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. Dr. Wiesner spent five years conducting basic and translational research using cutting-edge techniques within high-throughput sequencing techniques in particular. His work within skin cancer research resulted in key discoveries, in particular concerning the genomic landscape of skin tumours.
Based on his experience as a physician-scientist and his access to high-quality clinical samples, Dr. Wiesner plans to combine high-throughput sequencing technologies, computational approaches and functional assays in order to define the relevant genomic and epigenomic aberrations in skin cancer and pave the way for new mechanism-based cancer therapies.
Serum transcriptomics in melanoma patients
Grantee: Igor Vujic, MD, Assistant Professor, Sigmund Freud University & Department of Dermatology, Rudolfstiftung Hospital, Vienna
Amount: DKK 265,000
Grant category: Research Grants in open competition
Year: 2016
Geography: Austria
The Austrian-American team behind the study, led by Dr. Igor Vujic, aims at identifying more specific and sensitive biomarkers in order to better detect and monitor progression of malignant melanoma – a common and deadly skin cancer that is difficult to treat, and that accounts for numerous deaths each year.
In the clinic, physicians face two main problems around malignant melanoma: detection of early disease, and monitoring of disease progression, recurrence and its response to therapies. The existing melanoma biomarkers are not very specific and only rarely help.
Melanoma cells, however, produce a specific set of RNA molecules of which some are excreted and found in the blood stream – ready for identification and use as biomarkers. Recent technical advances make it possible to extract and analyse serum RNA and identify the cell of origin.
The team will mainly concentrate on non-coding RNAs, a new class of molecules known to be very specific for certain diseases such as cancer. Preliminary studies have identified and confirmed 237 interesting candidates through RNA-Seq TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) data.
In the course of the study, the team will perform RNA-Seq studies on serum samples from melanoma patients and healthy individuals to find differences in RNA quality and quantity to be used as melanoma serum-markers. The team will moreover test changes of the amount of these specific RNA molecules in melanoma patients over time to discover if they can be used as disease progression biomarkers.