基本信息
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Career Trajectory
Bio
During my research career so far I have developed a strong background in the brain tumor field, especially in glioblastoma (GBM), one of the most challenging and difficult forms of cancer, both in terms of treatment and effects on patients and their families. Having a tremendous fascination in molecular biology, immunology and neuro-oncology, my aim is to make the difference into the fight against cancer by developing new therapies against tumors.
I achieved my PhD working on brain tumors in the Molecular Neuro-Oncology Laboratory of Dr. Finocchiaro at Istituto Neurologico C.Besta, in Italy, where I primarily worked on microRNAs in GBM and, more importantly, I discovered a novel invasive marker, NEDD9, a protein implicated in tumor invasion and in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition. In parallel, I contributed to the characterization of the role of FOXP3, a transcription factor that plays important roles in regulatory T-cell formation in malignant glioma and evaluated the involvement of FABP7, a radial glia gene marker, in glioblastoma progression. Finally, I collaborated in a study to evaluate new loading methods for dendritic cells; I performed clinical analysis of MGMT methylation in glioma patients, and established a GBM cell culture bank by processing surgical tumor specimens. Thus I gained a broad experience of GBM biology, from basic to translational studies.
To continue my training I have chosen to work in one of the most exciting and challenging environments in medical research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS). I joined Dr Sean Lawler/Dr EA Chiocca's lab in September 2013 because I share his interest in therapeutic approaches for glioblastoma and it provided me with an opportunity to further develop my brain tumor research in an exciting research environment where I felt confident I would receive the best training. Dr Lawler is Director of a newly established DFCI/BWH Translational Neurooncology Core, in which his team is examining novel therapeutic approaches for brain tumors. This is giving me insight into animal models and the challenges faced in preclinical drug development. Dr Lawler fosters a highly interactive collaborative research environment and is dedicated to training and supporting his post-doctoral staff. As I grow in seniority I am finding that my guidance is often needed by new members of the lab and I have been given the opportunity in Dr Lawler’s lab to mentor students, and will have more opportunities to develop my own mentoring skills over the next three years. During this 2 years of postdoc I have become a peer reviewer for different scientific journals including Journal of Neuro-Oncology, Molecular Biology Reports, Cell Biochemistry and Biophysics. I have also had the opportunity to prepare reports, abstracts, and manuscripts. I have participated in multiple conferences, internal meetings and I will have opportunities to give oral and poster presentations of my research at conferences locally and internationally. Moreover, I had the chance to participate at the Discover BWH annual meeting and won a $1000 prize for research excellence award in 2015 and an award for Women's in Science and Medicine in 2016.
I have recently been working on elucidating novel signaling pathways in glioblastoma invasion (Speranza et al. Nature Scientific Report 2016) and to identify novel small molecules for glioblastoma treatment (Speranza et al. 2016. In preparation). I also collaborated to identify new anti-glioblastoma agents (Berghauser et al. Under revision), to design a microfluidic chip (Cho et al. 2016) and to discover that histone deacetylase 6 (HDAC6) has an inhibitory effect on oncolytic viral replication in glioma (Nakashima et al. 2015). I also collaborated to identify the impact of PD-L1 on glioblastoma-derived extracellular vesicles in immune evasion (Ricklefs et al. Science Translational Medicine. In revision) and to identify the role of CD4 and macrophages is mAb PD-1 therapy in brain tumors (Klein S. et al. In preparation).
In the last year I had the chance to start a new and exiting project to deeply investigate the roles of immune-checkpoint inhibitors in glioblastoma and to analyze the immune-response after viral therapies with the aim to combine this innovative approach with immune checkpoint inhibition (Speranza et al. JCI Submitted). Thanks to this amazing project, I find myself starting to appreciate immunology and my interest has steadily grown and I now find myself at the point where I want to build my career in immunology and immune-therapy. These are the reasons why I decide to enjoy Dr Freeman's lab at DFCI, where my goals are to identify mechanisms of immune evasion, understand the differences between responders and not-responders in checkpoint blockade therapies and find new TAAs. The final aim is to design more effective and personalize immunotherapy for multiple kind of cancers.
Research Interests
Papers共 44 篇Author StatisticsCo-AuthorSimilar Experts
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FRONTIERS IN IMMUNOLOGYno. 7 (2023): 1297932-1297932
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2022)
JOURNAL OF IMMUNOLOGYno. 1 (2018): 57.9-57.9
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