Kristopher R. Bosse

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Kristopher R. Bosse, MD

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics

The cure rate for children with neuroblastoma is unacceptable, making it imperative that new therapies are developed. Dr. Bosse's laboratory is focused on discovering and developing new neuroblastoma cell surface immunotherapeutic targets. Along with his colleagues, Dr. Bosse's aim is to capitalize on the robust differential expression of these molecules with immune-based therapies and also define their mechanisms of overexpression and roles in tumorigenesis.

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Bio

Despite the use of intensive multimodal therapy for neuroblastoma, approximately one-half of children still die from this disease. Dr. Bosse's laboratory focuses on the development of new immune-based therapies for this embryonal malignancy of the developing nervous system. Through these studies, Dr. Bosse and his colleagues hope to both improve their understanding of the critical biologic mechanisms driving neuroblastoma tumorigenesis and to translate new transformative immunotherapeutics to the clinic.

To this end, Dr. Bosse and his colleagues have discovered that the lineage-restricted oncoprotein, glypican-2 (GPC2), is robustly and selectively expressed on the surface of neuroblastomas and that this molecule is essential to neuroblastoma tumorigenesis. They are now focused on defining the biology of neuroblastoma’s dependence on GPC2 and developing immunotherapeutic approaches targeting GPC2, including antibody-drug conjugates and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Using their immunotherapeutic target discovery algorithm and validation platform, they are also developing additional differentially expressed neuroblastoma cell surface molecules for immune-based therapies. This work is done as part of the St. Baldricks-Stand Up To Cancer Immunogenomics Team.

An additional project in Dr. Bosse's laboratory is focused on the serial sequencing of circulating tumor (ctDNA) from neuroblastoma patients to define tumor heterogeneity and clonal evolution while children are receiving both conventional chemoradiotherapies and also more targeted therapeutics. Dr. Bosse anticipates these efforts may both help define a role for ctDNA profiling in the clinical care of children with neuroblastoma and other pediatric solid tumors and also identify novel mutated driver oncogenes that warrant additional functional validation.

Finally, Dr. Bosse's laboratory is also interested in defining the functional implications of neuroblastoma-associated germline genetic variation, with a particular interest in describing the role of common and rare genetic variation in the regulation of BARD1 gene expression and how these alterations collectively contribute to neuroblastoma predisposition.