Simonsen group

About us

In the Cancer Group we work on investigating exercise training as a potential adjunct treatment for cancer patients. To date, several hundred studies have been performed testing the effects of exercise in patients with cancer. Nonetheless, they have largely focused on exercise as physical rehabilitation and we contend that there might be a role for exercise as part of standard treatment.

Within our research projects we work on the following hypotheses:

• The perioperative period is critical for both short and long-term outcomes in patients with resectable tumors and comprises an underutilized window for optimizing the treatment trajectory.

• Skeletal muscle mass and function are measurable, prognostic, and actionable in cancer patients with direct implications for treatment tolerability and efficacy.

• Structured exercise training can directly impact tumor biology and mediate the efficacy of traditional cancer therapies by lowering toxicity burden and/or increasing anti-neoplastic efficacy.

In our studies, we recruit patients scheduled to or currently undergoing treatment. We aim to better understand how cancer and cancer treatment affect body composition and physical fitness in order to design and optimize targeted interventions with the aim of mitigating the adverse effects of cancer and anti-cancer treatment. By embedding molecular and integrative physiological studies into clinical trials, we further aim to elucidate the mechanisms through which exercise benefits cancer patients.

The overall aim of our research is to investigate if exercise training has a role as an adjunct treatment modality for patients with cancer.