The award was presented at the annual meeting of Onkologisk Forum in Trondheim November 20, 2025, an interest organization for professionals working with cancer in Norway, which hosts the country’s largest cancer conference. Each year, Onkologisk Forum grants a research prize of NOK 200,000 to a talented researcher early in their academic career. The goal is to stimulate young cancer researchers working in basic, clinical, epidemiological, or translational research who have delivered high-quality scientific work. The prize money is intended for research, equipment purchases, or academic travel.
Katrin feels greatly honored by this prize. “I am very grateful for this recognition, which not only honors our work but also affirms the importance of the research we are doing in Bergen,” she says.
Katrin’s research focuses on developing advanced mouse models for ovarian cancer that can improve treatment through novel immunotherapies and targeted, image-guided surgery. These models are based on patient-derived xenografts (PDX), where cancer tissue from patients is transplanted into mice. What makes Katrin’s models unique is that the mice are reconstituted with a functional human immune system, enabling them to mimic both the heterogeneity seen in patient tumors and key features of the human immune response.
Immunotherapy has revolutionized treatment for several types of cancer, but for ovarian cancer, neither checkpoint inhibitors nor CAR-T cells have shown promising results so far. Katrin aims to understand why, and to find new solutions. She characterizes both the genomic and phenotypic features of tumors in her PDX models, verifying their genetic fidelity to the original patient tumors. In addition, she studies the complex tumor microenvironment (TME), the interplay between cancer cells, immune cells, and supporting tissue.
The goal is to create a reliable preclinical model that reflects both tumor evolution and interactions with the immune system. This could become an important tool for testing new therapies before they reach clinical trials.
Katrin Kleinmanns earned her Ph.D. at the University of Bergen in 2019. Her dissertation was titled Rethinking High-Grade Serous Ovarian Carcinoma: Development of New Preclinical Animal Models for Evaluation of Image-guided Surgery and Immunotherapy. Her supervisors were CCBIO Professors Emmet Mc Cormack and Line Bjørge, and she is currently affiliated with their research groups as a researcher at CCBIO, the Medical Faculty, University of Bergen.
Congratulations!
Photo: Line Bjørge