Joseph Kendal

• Musculoskeletal Oncology
• Surgical management of metastatic bone disease
• Tumour immunology and intralesional drug delivery
• B-cells and tertiary lymphoid structures

The vision of our research program is to improve clinical outcomes for patients with MBD through evidence-based clinical pathways and novel clinical and translational research initiatives. Our translational program will be focused on pre-clinical modelling of metastatic bone disease using benchtop and in vivo models to further our understanding of disease mechanisms and effectiveness of novel therapies such as immunotherapy. Metastatic bone lesions have a discordant response to novel targeted therapies and immunotherapy compared to visceral or primary lesions, and we aim to elucidate mechanisms for this discrepancy and to evaluate strategies to modulate the local tumour immune microenvironment (TIME) to increase MBD lesion sensitivity to treatment. We aim to incorporate clinical samples into the tissue bank program to bolster our understanding of the MBD TIME. Through collaboration with the Monument lab, we are further interested in exploring tumour immune reprogramming in MBD and sarcoma in the context of B-lymphocytes and the induction of durable anti-tumour immune responses via tertiary lymphoid structures. 

Our clinical MBD program has established a large multi-centered Southern Alberta MBD surgical database over the past 8 years that is now incorporated into the international Bone Metastasis Registry. This database is unique in its granularity and size, with high-resolution data from over 590 patients from Alberta. One of our current initiatives is to enact prospective data collection including patient reported outcome measures (PROs), and to continue to pursue patient-engaged research. We have several ongoing projects evaluating surgical outcomes and care delivery in MBD patients with aim to ultimately improve clinical pathways and surgical outcomes.