Neuroblastoma is the most common extracranial solid tumor of childhood, causing 6% of all childhood cancers but 9% of deaths from malignant tumors in children. It is a tumor with highly heterogeneous clinical behavior, believed to originate from undifferentiated neural crest cells that form the sympathetic nervous system.

Data from publicly available datasets of patients show a potential role of the ODZ receptors (also called teneurins, abbreviated TENM) in survival, and whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing performed by our group has shown protein changing mutations of the ODZ receptors in neuroblastoma patients. The ODZ proteins are not well characterized, however it is known they are highly expressed during the development of the central nervous system and play roles in differentiation for drosophila flies and mice. Evidence suggests a function for dysregulated expression of the ODZs in human tumors, but investigations of a deeper cellular and molecular understanding in neuroblastoma are missing.

We have preliminary results that are of interest to investigate further. The aim of this study is to investigate the ODZ receptors to determine the role and function of these proteins in neuroblastoma tumor development, progression and metastasis. By doing your master research project in our lab you get to be in an excellent environment for future cancer research, and it may be a great opportunity to get to know our group for a future PhD position here. This project is a part of a greater PhD thesis project of a PhD student; collaboration and guidance with the PhD student will hence be feasible.

Our lab works with different techniques such as cell culturing, siRNA knockdown, confocal microscopy, western blot, real-time PCR, RNA sequencing, single cell sequencing, working with bioinformatic tools for understanding data of patients, in vivo experiments and more novel as well as standard biomolecular techniques. We are a research group of about 10 group members, including PI’s, a lab manager, and a bioinformatician.