Kristopher Sarosiek
Harvard University, MA·Pharmacology
Radiation therapy cures many childhood brain tumors, but the cure can come at a cost. More than half of children treated with external beam radiation for central nervous system tumors — medulloblastoma being the most common type — go on to experience lasting problems with learning, memory, planning, vision and fine motor control.
- Fields
Pharmacology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
apoptosis
BCL-2 family
radiation therapy
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Compare at single-cell resolution how radiation determines the fate of neurons, glial cells and blood-vessel endothelial cells in neonatal, juvenile and adult mouse brains, and establish which cell losses drive radiation-induced neurocognitive impairment.
- Test whether blocking apoptosis — the cell self-destruct program controlled by BCL-2 family proteins — genetically or with drugs targeting upstream regulators reduces or eliminates radiation-induced neurotoxicity in the developing mouse brain.
- Determine the long-term consequences of inhibiting apoptosis in brain tissue, including effects persisting after treatment, to assess whether protection can be achieved safely.
- Define how the developmental stage-dependent readiness of healthy brain cells to undergo BAX-mediated apoptosis explains why young children treated with radiotherapy suffer more severe cognitive deficits than adults.
More about the research
Those effects are far more severe in young children than in adults given similar doses, and no treatment exists to prevent them. This project asks why the developing brain is so vulnerable, and whether that vulnerability can be blocked without compromising cancer treatment.
Why it matters
Children who survive brain tumors often live for decades with treatment-caused deficits in learning, memory and coordination, and clinicians currently have no way to prevent them. Pinpointing which brain cell types die after radiation and showing that blocking apoptosis protects them could lead to drugs given alongside radiotherapy to preserve cognitive function in pediatric patients, improving quality of life for survivors and their families.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
James LaBelle
University of Chicago, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether venetoclax and other BH3 mimetics, drugs that block anti-death BCL-2 proteins, alter the function of CAR T cells made from healthy donors and heavily pretreated patients.
Tricia King
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify the strongest predictors of cognitive impairment in pediatric, adolescent and young adult medulloblastoma survivors by testing environmental resources, clinical factors and genetic variants separately at cancer centers in Georgia, Alabama and Ohio.
Matija Snuderl
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Compare epigenetic machinery and gene expression in mature versus primitive regions of human medulloblastoma tissue, using high-resolution genomic and epigenetic profiling.
The school
Harvard University: 42 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 712 research doctorates a year.
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