Professor Johanna Ivaska, a renowned leader in cancer research, has secured a prestigious €2.5 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to tackle a critical challenge: understanding how cancer spreads.

Johanna Ivaska, currently a K. Albin Johansson Professor and group leader at Turku Bioscience, will focus on the natural barriers within healthy bodies that can prevent or enable cancer metastasis.

“Many localised cancers are currently curable with surgery and medical treatment, but advanced and metastatic cancers are often fatal. The mechanisms of cancer metastasis are still poorly understood and no targeted drugs have been developed to combat them. In the funded project, we will study the interaction between cancer tissue and healthy tissue in patient samples and test our findings of the mechanisms of cancer metastasis using different laboratory tests,” says Professor Ivaska.

Professor Ivaska’s research team is particularly interested in breast and pancreatic cancers, aiming to understand how these cancers metastasize and if new biomarkers could predict disease aggressiveness. Ultimately, their goal is to identify new avenues for treating metastatic cancer, offering hope for improved patient outcomes.

Press release of University of Turku