Eirik Frengen (eirik.frengen AT medisin.uio.no)

 

Frengen is professor at Department of Medical Genetics, UiO (INFO).

Frengen's Research Group is located at the Department of Medical Genetics at Oslo University Hospital, Ullevål (see map).

The group utilizes novel technologies for detailed characterization of chromosomal aberrations in patients with pathological phenotypes. We reveal information about the genetic mechanisms underlying the aberrations, and obtain knowledge about biological consequences leading to disease symptoms (more details).

Research group members, see LINK

 Eirik

In another project, spinning disk confocal microscopy imaging is performed to monitor single cell behavior in tumors in live mice. This technology was utilized to visualize stromal cell dynamics in different tumor microenvironments (1). This paper was selected as Editors’ Choice in Science (Science 322:506, 2008).

The intravital imaging technology has further been used to study the effect of doxorubicin at the cellular level in intact tumors in genetically engineered mouse models of breast cancer.

In vivo imaging

Cancer cells in mouse tumors were studied by “live” microscopy to observe how they react to the widely used chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin. The resulting time-lapse movies revealed how drugs flowed through – and leaked out of – blood vessels feeding tumors; the manner and rate at which drugs killed cancer cells in tumors of different stages of advancement; and dynamics of the interactions between cells of the tumor and those of the surrounding stromal tissue, before, during and after drug administration. This work was published in Cancer Cell on April 17, 2012 (2).

In vivo imaging

This work is performed by Hanne Arenberg Askautrud in close collaboration with Professor Zena Werb (The University of California, San Francisco) and Assistant Professor Mikala Egeblad (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York).
1. Egeblad, M., Ewald, A. J., Askautrud, H. A., et al. Dis. Model. Mech, 1:155-167, 2008. (PDF).
2. Nakasone and Askautrud et al. Cancer Cell, 21:488-503, 2012.

 Time-lapse imaging to monitor vascular leakage and uptake of the chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin in mammary carcinoma in mice. The tumors contain blood vessels, and many cell types including cancer cells (blue). Leakage of doxorubicin from the blood vessels into the micro environment can be seen in orange. The green cells are immune cells, mostly macrophages.