Elisa Boscolo is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Experimental Hematology and Cancer Biology, at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Ohio. She received her undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology and PhD in Tissue Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy.
Dr. Boscolo completed her post-doctoral fellowship in the Vascular Biology Program at the Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, in the laboratory of Dr. Joyce Bischoff. Her studies on infantile hemangioma, a vascular tumor, led to the identification of a population of stem cells capable of forming hemangioma-like blood vessels when injected in mouse. This model has been a fundamental tool to investigate the efficacy of new drug treatments, and to elucidate the cellular and molecular targets of corticosteroids and propranolol, past and current treatments for this tumor. In 2010 Dr. Boscolo was promoted to Instructor and few years later was awarded an R01 from the NIH to generate a TIE2-related murine model of venous malformation.
In 2014, Dr. Boscolo was recruited to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Her laboratory focuses on modeling vascular anomalies in mouse with the use of patient-derived cells or with transgenic animal systems that mimic genetic defects found in patients. The goal of her research program is to identify genes and signaling pathways crucial for the formation of vascular anomalies as these discoveries can have the greatest impact on the understanding of processes regulating normal and pathological blood vessel formation.