Thale Olsen postdoc in the lab has been awarded the prestigious SIOP Award in the Translational category for her discovery of the malignant Schwann precursors in neuroblastoma.

The annual SIOP Congress is the yearly scientific meeting held by the International Society of Pediatric Oncology, and the largest global event for those working with pediatric cancer. This year’s congress was originally going to be held in Ottawa, Canada, but was instead held virtually.

Thale Kristin Olsen is a postdoc in the lab since 2017. At the 2020 SIOP conference, she presented her work on single-cell RNA sequencing of neuroblastoma. This project is in a close collaboration with Peter Kharchenko, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

In this project, Thale describe a novel neuroblastoma cancer cell type which closely mimics the normal Schwann cell precursors of the normal developing nervous system. These cells may contribute to tumor development and treatment resistance, and is now one of the Baryawno lab’s main focus areas. Thale shares the first authorship with Dr Jorg Otte, postdoc in the Baryawno lab, and Dr Shengling Mei postdoc in the Kharchenko lab. The work is available as a bioRxiv preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.04.077057v1.

Thale’s abstract was ranked as the best translational abstract at the conference, and she received the prestigious SIOP Award in the Translational category.