Glioblastoma is an aggressive and deadly form of cancer that is the most common primary malignant brain tumor in adults. Sam Bobholz, PhD, is well aware that the first step in treating this disease is being able to see it.
In Dr. Peter LaViolette’s lab, Dr. Bobholz, Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiology, helped develop autopsy tissue-based radio-pathomic maps of glioblastoma—a first in the field. Using the maps and artificial intelligence (AI), he created and validated an MRI-based tool to predict tumor probability and other cellular characteristics.
As a new member of the Cancer Center’s Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Program, Dr. Bobholz now hopes to take his work in brain cancer a step further and apply it to prostate cancer and epilepsy so that clinicians are better able to track and treat patients with those diseases.
Get to Know Dr. Bobholz
What made you want to focus your research on brain cancer?
Many people I have talked to when I mention I study brain cancer say that they’ve had a loved one pass of a glioma. It’s a devastating illness with a dire need for improving patient outcomes, particularly regarding identification of the full tumor extent on imaging. The MCW Neuro-Oncology Brain Bank, founded by Dr. LaViolette in 2010, is an unmatched resource for comparing imaging findings to ground truth pathology, and offers a rare look into how tissue characteristics and cellular features inform the MR signal.
Comparing these modalities has led us to using a wide breadth of techniques, including 3D printing, artificial intelligence, transcriptomics, digital pathology processing, and advanced neuroimaging, and we are always excited to try new methods for analyzing our diverse and unique dataset. In short, I find research focused on improving glioblastoma imaging both immensely critical for improving patient care and deeply fascinating as a cross-modality scientific pursuit.
Tell us about a current project or a collaboration you’re excited about.
I couldn’t possibly just pick one. We have an ongoing collaboration with University of California–San Francisco looking to integrate our autopsy-tissue derived radio-pathomic maps with their biopsy-derived radio-pathomic maps to improve the tracking of occult tumor invasion across patients’ clinical histories. We also began to generate transcriptomic data on our autopsy tissue with the help of our collaborators Dr. Rupen Desai and Dr. Jennifer Tuscher, both with targeted post-mortem biopsy samples for bulk RNA-seq and larger samples for single-cell spatial transcriptomics.
A particularly interesting study still in its early stages has focused on applying our glioma-based radio-pathomic maps to a dataset of epilepsy cases to see if features of our maps are able to offer insight into other disease states. Led by Dr. Hope Reecher, we have been able to show promise in differentiating between etiologies with our maps, indicating potential applications for our radio-pathomic maps beyond tumor imaging.
How will your Cancer Center membership enhance your work?
The Cancer Center has been instrumental in providing early support for these studies, allowing new ideas to turn into pilot data that then in turn lead to larger grants and discoveries. I received an American Cancer Society pilot grant from the Cancer Center that focuses on digital simulation and optimization of the prostate cancer biopsy procedure. This work will likely lead to a high-impact scientific product on its own, but will also lead to the development of a tool that can be used for comparing novel imaging modalities to the current reference standard and will aid in the development of an abbreviated prostate cancer screening protocol that could improve the surveillance for the second most common cancer diagnosis.
Why should we feel optimistic about research in brain cancer?
Optimism is often tough with regards to a terminal illness, but MCW has become a leading institution in the field of neuro-oncology in large part to the passionate, dedicated, and talented team of clinicians and researchers across disciplines that have been on the cutting edge of advancing patient care for gliomas.
Our radio-pathomic approach in particular heavily depends on effective cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers, neurologists, pathologists, radiologists, neurosurgeons, radiation oncologists and more, and having an exceptional team across all these disciplines has helped inform the development of our maps from a novel research finding to a clinically-implementable tool that addresses gaps in patient care. We are looking forward to continuing these collaborations as we continue to develop and assess our map’s performance in the clinical setting, and they give me hope that we can hopefully provide actionable improvements for patients faced with a glioma diagnosis.
How do you like to spend time outside of work?
Music is my primary side hustle. I play guitar for local punk band The No Writes, who will be dropping our self-produced EP “The Silver City Tapes Vol. 1” by the end of September! I also make experimental electronic music as a solo project under the name Snowshoe, where I’ve made songs featuring pedal steel, violin-bowed cactus, generative synth patches that play themselves, and garbled samples of whatever was on the radio at the time.
I also love seeking out the strangest movies I can find, whether it be the seven-hour Hungarian epic “Sátántangó,” the 20 minutes of strobe that makes up Tony Conrad’s “The Flicker,” or Hollis Frampton’s “Lemon,” which consists of a seven-minute shot of a lemon. I also enjoy cooking with my wife Nicole and my cats Lil’ Beethoven and Bean Machine.