Charlotte Elberling Almasi

MD

Ph.d. student

Key Research Interests
Clinical use of components of the uPA system, especially in lung cancer

Current Project
The title of my phD project is: "The prognostic value of the urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR) and its cleavage products in lung cancer". The aim of the project is in lung cancer to investigate the clinical use of intact and cleaved forms of uPAR measured by immunoassays in body fluids, and to describe and possibly quantitate the uPAR expression in paraffin embedded tumour tissue.

The urokinase plasminogen activator (uPA) system is an extracellular protease system, active during cancer invasion. A key-role is played by the cellular receptor uPAR, consisting of three domains denoted I, II and III. uPA cleaves uPAR between domain I and II, liberating domain I. The collective amount of uPAR forms measured by ELISA is prognostic in tumour tissue in several forms of cancer, including squamous cell lung cancer. It has been suggested that uPAR cleavage occurs predominantly in areas of tissue remodelling, such as cancer invasion, where both uPAR and uPA are expressed at high levels. Consequently, the cleavage of uPAR could reflect the malignant potential of cancer, and the individual cleavage products could be stronger prognostic markers than the collective amount of uPAR forms. Therefore immunoassays have been developed in the Finsen Laboratory making it possible to investigate the prognostic impact of the indivual uPAR forms.

The uPAR expression has been studied in several types of cancer, using different techniques and antibodies. uPAR can both be expressed by cancer cells and by different stromal cells including fibroblasts, macrophages and endothelial cells, varying between types of cancer. A special feature is an over expression of uPAR in the leading edge in some invasive cancer types. At the Finsen Laboratory we mainly use the monoclonal antibody R2 in the studies on the uPAR expression by immunohistochemistry, which binds the domain III of uPAR. Lately the method have been optimized, and tried on different types of tumour tissue, including oral squamous cell carcinomas, and breast neoplasms. As an extension of my quantitative study of uPAR in both tumour tissue and body fluids from lung cancer patients, I aim to evaluate the expression of uPAR in NSCLC, and possibly develop a semi-quantitative model to score the uPAR expression and estimate its prognostic value.


Career
Education:
1999 January: M.D.,University of Southern Denmark, Odense Campus

Professional career:
1.9.05-
Enrolled as a phD student at the Copenhagen University, Faculty of Health Sciences

1.4.03-31.8.05
Rigshospitalet, The Finsenlaboratory, research assistant

1.4.02-31.3.03
Rigshospitalet, Dept. of Oncology, senior registrar

1.3.01-28.2.02
Hillerød Hospital, Dept. of Internal Medicine, F, senior registrar

1.9.00-28-2-01
General Practice at Lawaetz , Østergård og Jensen in Rungsted, pre-registration house officer

1.3.00-31.8.00
Hillerød Hospital, Dept. of Internal Medicine, B, pre-registration house officer

1.9.99-28.2.00
Hillerød Hospital, Dept. of Surgical Gastro-enterology, pre-registration house officer

1.2.99-31.7.99
Odense University Hospital, Dep. of Oncology, substitute for senior registrar

Other:
Member of and the interest organization “Focus on Lung Cancer”, FOLK, a group of young researchers who’s aim it is to rice attention on lung cancer and to arrange the International Lung Cancer Awareness day on the 17th. of November in Denmark each year (co-founder and meeting organizer).