Dr. Laiho is a Visiting Professor and Director of the Division of Molecular Radiation Sciences at the Department of Radiation Oncology. She also holds a position as a Professor in Molecular Cancer Medicine at the University of Helsinki, Finland. At Radiation Oncology, she leads a recently established research division that focuses on the basic mechanistic aspects of cellular responses to genetic lesions and strives towards translating this information to improved cancer therapies.

Dr. Laiho focuses on the relevance and implications of cellular DNA damage responses in cancer. The sensing, detection and repairing of DNA lesions are of vital importance to maintain the genomic integrity and act as barriers against the development of cancer. In advanced cancer, many pathways that govern proper DNA damage control are lost, and conditions prevail which augment the accrual of genetic errors. Several modes of cancer therapies, like radiation and many cytotoxic drugs exploit the vulnerability of tumor cells incapable of normal damage control. The particular interest of Dr. Laiho is the function and regulation of a key DNA damage response protein, the p53 tumor suppressor. She focuses on mechanisms mediating the activation of p53 in response to cell stress, and on attempts to revoke its activity. The Laiho group has presented findings of altered p53 and DNA damage checkpoint responses in the prostate, which may indicate that the relaxed damage control could predispose the organ to the highly frequent tumorigenic processes observed clinically. Her approaches are aimed to provide highly significant novel information on the regulation of cellular DNA damage and tumorigenesis pathways, to identify novel targets for therapy, and to provide novel lead compounds for preclinical trials. The studies aim at a rapid transfer of findings arising from focused mechanistic studies into translational cancer research.