Join us for the Winter Series
of the St Mary’s Infection & Immunity Seminar Series (hybrid)
Päivi M Ojala
Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Finland
Päivi Ojala is the Professor of Cancer Cell Biology at University of Helsinki. Since October 2021, she is also a visiting professor at the Imperial College London, UK.
Dr. Ojala holds a doctoral degree in Molecular Genetics from the University of Helsinki and has received postdoctoral training at the Yale School of Medicine, CT, USA.
Biography
She has made significant contributions to the Kaposi’s Sarcoma herpesvirus (KSHV) field and her research also focuses also on the role of lymphatic endothelial microenvironment on cancer cell metastasis. She has expertise in organotypic 3D co-culture models, cell-based high-content screens, protein kinase signalling and viral technologies. Her work has led to demonstration of restoration of p53 function by small molecule inhibitors as a therapeutic modality for KSHV-induced lymphomas, identification of host cell Pim kinases, nucleophosmin and developmental transcription factors as novel regulators of viral replication and transcription and shown that KSHV infection reprograms lymphatic endothelial cells (LECs) to a new, more invasive cell type. They have also demonstrated that LEC interaction with melanoma cells leads to increased distant organ metastasis in vivo, which is dependent on MMP14, Notch3 and beta1-integrin.
Expertise
Oncogenic herpesvirus
Cancer biology
Cell therapies
Research focus
Virus- host interactions
Endothelial tumor microenvironment
Metastasis
CAR T cell therapy
Competing interests statement
Päivi Ojala receives funding from the Sigrid Juselius Foundation, Finnish Cancer Foundations, and Finnish Red Cross Research Grants as well as from Gertrude Biomedical Ltd Pty (Australia) and Orion Corporation (Finland).
Join in person at the St Mary’s Campus, Medical School Building, Anthony Rothschild Lecture Theatre, 2nd Floor
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