Event Details

2^nd October at 12:00
Onsite event
in Presidentti auditorium, BioCity
Autumn 2025 program

Prof. Olli Kallioniemi, FIMM, HiLife, University of Helsinki, Finland
Technology-, data- and AI-driven translational cancer research

Host: Klaus Elenius (klaele@utu.fi)

Coffee and sandwich served at 11:45, first come first serve!

Six PhD researchers and early-career postdocs are welcome to have a lunch and discuss with Prof. Kallioniemi after the seminar. This is a great possibility to learn hosting skills in a friendly environment and create connections for future. Everyone is welcome to join, BioCity Turku will offer the lunch.

If you got interested, please send an email to biocityturku@bioscience.fi

Olli Kallioniemi is Research Director at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), part of HiLIFE at the University of Helsinki. He also holds an adjunct professorship in Molecular Precision Medicine at Karolinska Institutet.

Kallioniemi earned his M.D. and Ph.D., along with a specialization in Laboratory Medicine, at the University of Tampere, Finland. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Francisco (1990–1992) and subsequently served as a tenure-track group leader at the NHGRI / National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD (1995–2001). After receiving tenure, he returned to Finland to direct the Turku Medical Biotechnology Unit of VTT/University of Turku. In 2007, he became the founding director of FIMM – the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland at the University of Helsinki – as part of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for Molecular Medicine, a role he held until 2015. From 2015 to 2024, he served as Director of Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab, www.scilifelab.se) in Stockholm, Sweden’s national infrastructure for life science, while also holding a professorship at Karolinska Institutet.

Kallioniemi’s research focuses on functional and systems medicine in cancer, with an emphasis on technology-enabled, data- and AI-driven precision medicine strategies to improve diagnostics and therapy, particularly for acute myeloid leukemia and prostate cancer. He was the founding director (2021–2025) of a 12-year, SEK 3.3 billion (approx. €300 million) multi-university research program on data-driven life science (DDLS), funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

His current work centers on applying AI to the analysis of molecular medicine and human health datasets, and on developing translational applications of AI. This initiative is supported by the Brain Gain Research Grant from the Finnish Medical Foundations (Erkko Foundation, Sigrid Jusélius Foundation, and the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim). He also co-leads a national initiative by the Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and SITRA to plan the future use of health data in Finland.

Selected publications

Pathway activation model for personalized prediction of drug synergy. Trac QT, Huang Y, Erkers T, Östling P, Bohlin A, Osterroos A, Vesterlund M, Jafari R, Siavelis I, Backvall H, Kiviluoto S, Orre L, Rantalainen M, Lehtiö J, Lehmann S, Kallioniemi O, Pawitan Y, Vu TN. Elife. 2025 Jun 3;13:RP100071

Breeze 2.0: an interactive web-tool for visual analysis and comparison of drug response data. Potdar S, Ianevski F, Ianevski A, Tanoli Z, Wennerberg K, Seashore-Ludlow B, Kallioniemi O, Östling P, Aittokallio T, Saarela J. Nucleic Acids Res. 2023 Jul 5;51(W1):W57-W61

Drug response profiles in patient-derived cancer cells across histological subtypes of ovarian cancer: real-time therapy tailoring for a patient with low-grade serous carcinoma. Murumägi A, Ungureanu D, Khan S, Arjama M, …, Pellinen T, Bützow R, Aittokallio T, Kallioniemi O. Br J Cancer. 2023 Feb;128(4):678-690

General information

• You can download and save all the autumn 2025 FoS-seminars to your calendar from here: https://seafile.utu.fi/d/44a70f80ac1e46a9ad0a/
• Registration is not needed, participation list is circulated in the audience
• If you are a student and later wish to get a certificate of attendance from the Frontier of Science seminars, print out the seminar diary and after the seminar ask the BioCity coordinator to sign it https://seafile.utu.fi/d/44a70f80ac1e46a9ad0a/
• Please note that any audio or video recording of the seminars is strictly forbidden.
• Autumn 2025 image credits to Kari Kaunisto: Sahlberg family collections, Biodiversity unit, University of Turku