COOPERATION BETWEEN NMU AND KAROLINSKA INSTITUTE IN ENDOCRINE SURGERY PROJECTS

Bogomolets National Medical University (NMU) and Karolinska Institutet (KI) has a 10 years anniversary of scientific cooperation. Out of many research project, there is one within the field of endocrine surgery, which is ongoing by Department of surgery №4 at NMU and Dept. Of Oncology-Pathology at KI.

During the visit to KI in December 2016, delegation from NMU visited Department of Oncology-Pathology KI at the Cancer Center Karolinska (Karolinska University Hospital (Solna) and had a meeting with collaborators in endocrine surgery project.

There was a meeting with Professor Catharina Larsson – geneticist and group leader of Medical Genetics research group and with Professor Jan Zedenius – endocrine surgeon from research group “Endocrine Surgery” at Department of Molecular Medicine and Surgery. During the meeting scientists from NMU and KI discussed the status of the ongoing studies of parathyroid and medullary thyroid carcinoma. These studies are translational research projects aiming to identify promising molecular genetic features of parathyroid tumors as well as to identify molecular markers that can be used for choosing of chemotherapy in patients with medullary thyroid cancer. It is worth to note that medullary thyroid cancer is associated with worth prognosis due to frequent locoregional and distant metastases, higher risk of recurrence, resulting in lower survival of patients.

This project is supervised by head of Department of Surgery №4 Professor Volodymyr Mishalov and assistant Professor Andriy Dinets Ph.D. at NMU, who identified a unique cohort of Ukrainian patients with medullary thyroid cancer to be represented by post-operative clinical samples, which are currently undergone molecular and genetics investigations. Because of this scientific collaboration, a cohort of Ukrainian patients has been doubled the number of clinical samples of colleagues from Karolinska Institutet. Currently a significant number of laboratory studies were performed, a draft of manuscript is under preparation as well as journal (indexed in Scopus, Thomson Reuters) for future submission is under discussion.

Furthermore, during the meeting with Professor C. Larsson and Professor J. Zedenius were discussed preliminary results of ongoing studies and outlined next steps for the project.

The common problem of research project is a relatively low number of samples, such as with medullary cancer due to its 5-10% frequency out of all malignant neoplasms of the thyroid gland. Involvement of cohorts from other countries significantly improves the representativity of the results, and increases the chances of publication in the journal with higher impact factor.

Department for International Cooperation