Certainly NAnA played a key role in my career as an “aspiring researcher.” Winning the Francesca Martini prize for my master’s thesis marked the first major recognition for the achievements produced during mygraduate I am sure that joining this community will only enrich my journey as a scientist, allowing me to measure myself with other researchers who share my passion for hematology research.

To date, I believe I have contributed to shed light on the molecular dynamics involved in the development of EM-AML. Indeed, most of the existing data in literature about this condition are from a clinical perspective, without delving too deeply into the cancer biology. I believe that investigating the role of molecules and signal transduction pathways is essential to add significant building blocks for the development of more personalized therapeutic strategies.

For my research project, I employed a high-throughput approach. In detail, I focused on genomic and transcriptomic analysis of patients who developed an extramedullary localization, showing a significant difference in gene expression between bone marrow and secondary sites samples. This result provided the rationale for a functional enrichment analysis, which revealed an up-regulation of pathways involved in systemic spreading of leukemic blasts. This finding was confirmed by migration and invasion functional assays, exploiting a cell-line modeling leukemia cell behavior.

I delved into the molecular characterization of extramedullary acute myeloid leukemia (EM-AML), a rare manifestation of AML. Since the mechanisms underlying the development of EM-AML are unclear, with my research I proved the involvement of TWIST1 gene in leukemic dissemination, in a process that mimics the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, a hallmark of solid tumors.

I’m a PhD candidate in Immunology, Molecular Medicine and Applied Biotechnology at University of Rome “Tor Vergata” – Oncohematology laboratory. During a typical day in my lab, I used to “take care” of my cell cultures, plan the experiments and analyze the data/results.