Giulia Piaggio

Giulia Piaggio accomplished her postdoctoral fellowship at the EMBL in Heidelberg. She joined in 1991 the Regina Elena National Cancer Institute of Rome as senior scientist, where she is still working as a team leader. She spent several periods as visiting scientist in the laboratory of Molecular Growth Regulation, of the NICHHD at NIH. Since her postdoc at EMBL she is interested in transcriptional regulation of gene expression during cell proliferation, differentiation and transformation. Her work lead to the identification, during differentiation, of a common mechanism of inactivation of a class of cell cycle regulatory genes mediated by the absence of the NF-Y transcriptional factor. Moreover, her studies have contributed to describe molecular mechanisms trough which mutant p53 proteins exert their gain of function. Indeed, she identified that a complex of the mutant p53 protein, the NF-Y transcription factor, and the p300 protein has a role in regulating chromatin state and gene expression in proliferating cells and following DNA damage, with resultant effects on the proliferation of cancer cells. During her visits at NIH she set up several techniques to follow transcription in living cells, tissues and animals: in vivo genomic footprinting, ChIP and FRAP. Recently, she has been involved in the development of a transgenic mouse model to follow physiological and pathological proliferation events by bioluminescence in vivo imaging, BLI. This animal model get the cover picture of the volume of the MboC journal in 2012 and, again, on Annals of Anatomy in 2016. This animal model has been sold in Europe, thanks to a collaboration between IFO and the Italian biotech, Transgenic Operative Products, and on American market through the Charles River, a leading company in this field. Very recently, in collaboration with the IFOM zebrafish facility, she is involved in the development of the same biological model in zebrafish. Besides her studies on animal model she is also interest in the possible use of cfDNA levels and the preoperative neutrophil lymphocytes (NLR) ratio as prognostic biomarkers of endometrial cancer (EC). Tumor cells can manipulate neutrophils to create different states of phenotypic and functional polarization that can in turn alter tumor behavior. Several studies have demonstrated a role of extracellular neutrophil traps (NETs) in the cancer progression and metastases. This mechanism, called NETosis, could be correlated to the high release of cfDNA into the bloodstream under pathological conditions, in the adhesion of the tumor cells and peritoneal metastases. She is now interest to assess the role of NETosis as a diagnostic marker and therapeutic target in the EC and provide evidence of his possible involvement in hematogenic and peritoneal metastases. In this regard, she actively collaborate with the Gynaecology Unit at IRE. Responsabilities: She is a group leader directly involved in the overall supervision of her research team by providing scientific inputs, discussing the ongoing experiments and ensuring the timely achievement of the proposed tasks. She is responsible for the critical evaluation of the results and their publication in peer reviewed journals. Since 1994, she is responsible of the budget of several public and private grant research projects and is the tutor of PhD students. She share her time also helping the grantoffice activities: - she is responsible for the annual report of the scitific activities of the Institute to the Mininster; -she is part of the working group for the planning of the institutional strategy for the procedure for the publication of scientific articles which includes the rules for the storage of the raw data and the analysis of the integrity of the research; -she is member of the IFO-IRE Patent Commette; -she collaborates with Alleanza Contro il Cancro in the Eranet Transcan project.