November 2023 – Monthly portrait of a young researcher
Shivani Chiranth is a medicine student, currently studying in her 8th semester at University of Copenhagen. She has been a part of the DCCC, Brain Tumor Center since the summer of 2022 and has been a part of multiple projects.
She wrote her bachelor project with the BTC center, under the supervision of Thomas Urup, Hans Poulsen and Seppo Langer on targeted therapy to treat vestibular schwannoma in patients with NF2-related Schwannomatosis. This has since been presented as a poster at the annual Danish Society of Clinical Oncology conference and has been published as an article in Neuro-Oncology advances.
From August 2022 to January 2023, Shivani took a sabbatical from university to work on Glioblastoma research under the supervision of Thomas Urup and Hans Poulsen. She has primarily specialized in characterizing recurrence patterns in patients with glioblastoma. She worked specifically with a cohort of patients from 2016 to 2021 and has registered various radiological tumor characteristics in the common glioblastoma database. She has further analyzed the data to find associations between various clinical, molecular, radiological, and genetic biomarkers and the recurrence patterns of glioblastoma.
Since resuming her degree at the University of Copenhagen she has continued working part-time at the research center and has continued her research on the recurrence patterns of glioblastomas. She is currently in the process of turning her work into an article and her findings are also set to be presented as a poster at the Society of Neuro-Oncology conference at Vancouver, Canada from November 15th-19th.
She plans to continue working in the field of glioblastoma research under the excellent supervision and guidance of Thomas Urup and Hans Skovgaard Poulsen.
Research focus:
Targeted cancer therapy; NF2-related Schwannomatosis; Glioblastoma; Characterization of recurrence patterns and radiological tumor characteristics; Tumor biomarker research