Doctoral education pilot in precision cancer medicine launches in 2024

Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture announced on 7.2.2024 the allocation of 255 million EUR to universities for piloting new practices in doctoral education in various fields in 2024-2027. The doctoral education pilot in precision cancer medicine, which is based on the iCAN Digital Precision Cancer Medicine Flagship, was granted with 152 doctoral positions and 38,8 million EUR funding.

The pilot in precision cancer medicine aims to improve doctoral education efficiency and labor market relevance in the iCAN flagship area. It is a collaborative effort of 5 universities (University of Helsinki as the coordinator, University of Eastern Finland, University of Oulu, Tampere University, and University of Turku) and their respective health care providers (HUS Helsinki University Hospital, Wellbeing services counties of Pohjois-Savo, Pohjois-Pohjanmaa, Pirkanmaa, and Southwest Finland). The pilot is organized around the regional nodes of the Finnish Cancer Center FICAN that are participating in the national iCAN flagship program providing synergistic value to the pilot. In addition there are three industry and third sector partners: Pharma Industry Finland (PIF), Healthtech Finland, Finnish BioIndustries (FIB), and Finnish Cancer Institute.

The tight interactions between academic doctoral education and future employers is an outstanding opportunity to foster further innovations and solutions to the unmet needs in the precision cancer medicine area.

Thank you to all our partners for collaboration so far!

The call for doctoral researchers will be published soon as the first cohort of doctoral students in the pilot are expected to start in August 2024, and the second in January 2025.

Photo by Kapina Oy