The Pindborg Prize 2021 to Dana Costea
Dana Costea is this year’s receiver of the Pindborg Prize, an annual award issued by The Scandinavian Fellowship of Oral Pathology and Oral Medicine (SFOPOM), in memory of the late Professor Jens J. Pindborg, internationally renowned dentist and pathologist.
![Photo of Costea holding her lecture.](https://www.uib.no/sites/w3.uib.no/files/styles/content_main/public/media/costea_pindborg_lecture_2021_web.jpg?itok=P1-EOYzX×tamp=1624606942)
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The SFOPOM include members from the majority of the Scandinavian universities, and also from Finland, the Netherlands and Italy. The society has had an annual meeting since 1977, and since 1985, an exceptional and significant researcher or consultant in oral pathology or oral medicine has been asked to give the Pindborg lecture, which is considered as a great honour.
The association highlights that Dana was one of the first to describe the heterogeneity of cancer associated fibroblasts in oral squamous cell carcinoma, and has established robust 3D organotypic models of normal and neoplastic human oral mucosa as research tools for
tumor-stroma interactions.
In her Pindborg lecture June 24, 2021 at the 20th International Congress on Oral Pathology & Oral Medicine, a Joint Meeting of the IAOP and BSOMP with the Scandinavian Fellowship of Oral Pathology and Oral Medicine, Dana gave a talk on Multifaceted tumor-stroma interactions in oral squamous cell carcinoma. See the full program here.
"It has been a great honor for me to receive the award and to hold the Pindborg lecture," Dana says.
"Jens Pindborg was a Danish pathologist who established oral pathology as a discipline in Europe. He was also a great teacher and a fantastic lecturer, therefore to receive the prize and hold the lecture named after him carries also a huge responsibility," she explains. "It has to be a lecture of good quality and the expectations are high. With more than 1500 online participants during this event, I felt that responsibility even more acute. I was at the same time extremely glad and excited that I could share my views on the importance of tumor stroma for tumor progression to such a large audience," Dana continues.
"I received many interesting questions and I needed to answer for hours after that to the many questions I received. This has been the actual real award, to be able to elicit the interest of the research and oral pathology specialists community with my lecture and the results of my team," she concludes.