Research Director Tiina Jokela from Biobank Central Finland and the Ģֱ prevents cancer by investigating lifestyles
Tiina Jokela’s responsibilities are divided between the University ofJyväskylä and Biobank Central Finland. She started in her current role on 1 May 2024. Jokela’s responsibilities include the development of biobank activities, the teaching of cellular and molecular pathology at the Ģֱ, and leading and conducting research on cancer biomarkers.
Lifestyles help us stay healthy
Tiina Jokela’s research concentrates on Lynch syndrome. The syndrome is caused by defective forms of DNA repair genes, and persons carrying such genes have a higher risk to get a cancer even before middle age. Moreover, many of these syndrome carriers encounter several incidences of cancer in their life. Jokela investigates within a Lynch cohort the connections that lifestyles pertaining to physical activity and nutrition have in relation to risk of cancer and biomarkers in blood, i.e. cancer biomarkers.
“My research investigates, at the cellular and molecular level, how lifestyle, such as diet and physical activity, impact the risk of getting cancer,” Jokela says. “A healthy diet and ample physical activity do significantly decrease the risk of cancer, but as yet we don’t know well enough the molecular and cellular level mechanisms that bring about protection against cancer.”
Once we understand how the body can avert cancer, we can enhance the body’s self-protection. It may be possible to generalise this knowledge and thus prevent other cancers as well. At the same time, it gives a chance to identify drug-free means for cancer prevention.
“Prevention is central to health promotion,” says Jokela. “So, my research seeks to develop new methods by which we could prevent cancer and diagnose the occurrences as early as possible.”
Cooperation with the biobank and experts-by-experience
In Jokela’s research, they analyse the blood samples of people with Lynch syndrome and examine RNA molecules, metabolic products and immune cells which may tell about the risks of cancer development and about the likelihood of illness. These research results can be later validated more extensively by biobank samples. The study also involves an advocates who has personal experience of living with Lynch syndrome.
“Cooperation with an advocates deepens our understanding of Lynch syndrome and increases the utilisation potential of this study,” Jokela says. “This kind of cooperation helps us better recognise the effects of a high risk of cancer more holistically in life and also develop research and research communication to reach the target group more effectively.”
Biobank available for all
As the Research Director of Biobank Central Finland, Jokela wants to develop cooperation especially between the wellbeing services county of Central Finland and the Ģֱ. It is also important to make biobank work more visible so that researchers can make use of biobank data more widely and more diversely.
“The biobank puts huge research datasets at researchers’ disposal. Collecting these by other means would take several years,” Jokela says. “For a good new research idea, necessary samples may already be available in the biobank, which can greatly speed up the research process.”
Multidisciplinary research at JYU
Jokela is engaged in research cooperation with several faculties at the Ģֱ. In addition, she is on the management team of JYU.Well, a multidisciplinary research community on wellbeing. Research is pursued for instance with researchers of the respective Faculties of Sport and Health Sciences, Information Technology, and Mathematics and Science. She appreciates particularly the multidisciplinary character of the Ģֱ.
“Networking has been really easy at the Ģֱ, but we could also collaborate even more,” Jokela says. “Cooperation helps generate new kinds of multidisciplinary research in Jyväskylä for the promotion of wellbeing, innovations and product development.”
Help for everyone
While the Research Director’s post is in the Department of Biological and Environmental Science, Jokela works for the whole faculty and University. “I’m pleased to help everybody interested in biobank work,” Jokela says, “and we can jointly develop ideas as to how biobank data could be used in research. Moreover, our biobank team will willingly come present biobank work to departments or research teams.”
