People

Members of the Single-cell Transcriptomics of Cancer Laboratory.
Anna Vähärautio

PhD, Principal Investigator

Anna Vähärautio (nee Saramäki) is a cancer researcher with a biochemistry background and informatics interest. During her post-doc in Karolinska Institute, Sweden (2009-2012), she developed the wet-lab application for Kivioja*, Vähärautio* et al. Nature Methods 2012,  that for the first time introduced unique molecular identifiers (UMIs), a concept that is now widely used to enable quantitative transcriptomics in single cells.In her lab, both wet-lab method development and informatics tools are applied in a translational context to study the development of treatment resistance in ovarian cancer.  She wishes to combine high-resolution transcriptional analysis of unique, longitudinal clinical tumor specimens with novel methodological approaches to find new perspectives on cancer drug resistance by disentangling the dynamics of resistance on single cell level.

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Matías Marín Falco

PhD, Postdoctoral researcher

Matías is a MSCA postdoctoral fellow interested in the analysis of copy-number aberrations in scRNAseq data and its implications in moduling the tumor's trancriptome as well as the response to chemotherapy in HGSOC.

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Jun Dai

PhD student

My research interest is utilizing CRISPR/Cas9 based genome editing or gene perturbation and single-cell RNA sequencing to test the function of specific genes on cancer initiation, metastasis, target treatment and chemoresistance.

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Anna Pirttikoski

PhD student

Anna focuses on analyzing scRNA-seq data of high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) patient samples and their normal counterpart samples from fallopian tube epithelium. The projects involve the identification of cell states and characterization of their dynamical relationships within normal and cancer cells. Her interests are in tumor evolution and drug resistance.

Jing Jiang

MD, Visting Researcher

Lasse Suominen

Undergraduate student

Teemu Närhi

Undergraduate student

Joona Jäntti

Undergraduate student

Anastasiya Chernenko

MSc, Lab Manager

Anastasiya Chernenko is the lab manager, technician and study nurse. She keeps Vähärautio Lab safe, clean, organized, equipped and smoothly running. 

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Saundarya Shah

Lab Coordinator

Saundarya Shah helps with the day-to-day laboratory operations and makes sure the lab runs smoothly.

Alumni
  • Anna Perkiö, undergraduate student
  • Erdogan Pekcan Erkan, postdoctoral researcher: now in Toni Seppälä lab
  • Marika Lassila, undergraduate student
  • Sohrab Saraei, undergraduate student: now Bioinformatics Software Developer in Blueprint Genetics
  • Xanthoula Karypidou , research assistant