Overview
Tom Bosschaerts is Chief Operating Officer of ImmuneWatch, a company he co-founded in September 2021 and where he took up his current role in January 2026. He had previously served as its Director of Operations from April 2023.
Based in Lier, Bosschaerts held a series of valorisation manager posts at the University of Antwerp between June 2018 and April 2023, covering life sciences, the PreMeT programme, and infectious diseases and environmental health. Before that he was project and grant manager at eTheRNA, senior project manager life sciences at CMAST from 2014 to 2018, and project manager global public health at The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. Earlier in his career he was R&D manager at Dafra Pharma and a medical and scientific writer at Archemin.
He studied bio-science engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, graduating in 2005, and went on to complete a PhD in immunology and infectious diseases there in 2010. He attended Atheneum Lier from 1996 to 2000.
Career history
In the news
- Why is TCR-epitope prediction so much better validated for viruses than for cancer?" is a question worth answering properly. Viral epitopes are shared across patients, so you can generate TCR-epitope training data on them at scale. CMV, EBV, SARS-CoV-2, all well covered. Tumor neoantigens are private to each patient, so the reference data is much thinner. That's exactly why infectious disease and vaccine monitoring is a strong place to apply epitope-specific T-cell annotation right now. On 30 September we're running a
- We teamed up with QIAGEN for a joint grant program on TCR sequencing! Grant winners get free TCR sequencing and in-depth TCR data analysis in service. Check out our website for more information, or register for our webinar with QIAGEN tomorrow to learn more about this opportunity. https://lnkd.in/eNUBxi2x
- Two new names now sit on ImmuneWatch's board: Catherine Sanders and Jurgen Del Favero. Catherine ran commercial and business development at Adaptive Biotechnologies for years before iOrganBio, where she's Chief Business Officer today. Jurgen was CTO and co-founder of Multiplicom, and now runs genomics strategy at CellCarta. That's two decades of turning academic sequencing technology into commercial products people actually pay for. Exactly the gap we needed filled as we scale ImmuneWatch. Really proud to have them both on board!
- Building a spin-off out of a university lab usually brings a lot of deep scientific knowledge to the table but just a thin layer of commercial experience. Me and Tom Bosschaerts worked very hard to change that. One of the calls we made along the way: open up the board to people outside the founding team. So here it is: Catherine Sanders and Jurgen Del Favero joined our board this month. I met Catherine in the startup zone at the World Vaccine Congress in Washington. She mentioned she also had a background in TCR sequencing
- We have the PBMCs, is TCR sequencing really worth it?" I am definitely biased but TCR sequencing brings a lot of extra value to the table. Thinks like T cell diversity, whether they are expanding, or contracting over time, what they might be reacting to, ... Real evidence in response to a treatment. To get more of that analysis done, we teamed up with QIAGEN to fund the full workflow for up to 4 projects, 2 academic and 2 biopharma: 1) QIAGEN's RNA extraction kit, shipped directly to the lab 2) QIAseq Targeted RNA TCR Panel library
- If you are interested in TCR repertoires analysis, this review by the lab of our academic co-founders is highly recommended! By going over a range of computational tools and approaches, they discuss different TCR-antigen annotation and TCR clustering solutions. The review also includes an explanation of how our own tool ImmuneWatch DETECT works! https://lnkd.in/dQDHa6A5
- Can you identify and monitor pathogenic T cells in autoimmune diseases?' We get this question more often, so it seems like there is growing interest in the field to use TCR sequencing in autoimmunity. The answer is yes, with in-depth clustering analysis and antigen-specificity evaluation using ImmuneWatch DETECT. For type 1 diabetes for example, we have a lot of epitope-TCR training data in our database so we can reliably monitor T cells against these antigens. Any T1D antigens we are still missing? Register for our webinar
- New webinar alert! We usually focus on applications in oncology, but we decided to do something different this time and tackle TCR analysis in autoimmunity. We found a huge public TCR dataset on type 1 diabetes and decided to crunch this data and annotate TCR specificity for all diabetes antigens in our database. Curious to see what we found? Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/eKE4tb4k
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