Receiving the NAnA ETS award was a meaningful recognition of my efforts. It served as an encouragement to continue pursuing my research with dedication and reinforced my passion for the field.

I consider the PhD fellowship at the Tettamanti Research Center one of my major achievements, as it has allowed me to fully immerse myself in a field of research I am deeply passionate about: pediatric leukemia.

I am conducting in vitro studies to explore the mechanistic effects of these drugs and evaluate their therapeutic potential when combined with standard chemotherapy. Following this, I will carry out in vivo experiments using a mouse model to further assess the effectiveness of these drug combinations.

Given the aggressiveness of the disease and the urgent need for novel and more effective targeted therapies for infant KMT2Ar ALL patients, my ongoing project is focused on identifying and validating novel therapeutic compounds through drug repurposing, which could be immediately translatable to the clinic to offer these young patients an alternative treatment.

I am currently a PhD student at the Tettamanti Research Center in Monza, where I work in the research group led by Dr. Giovanni Cazzaniga. My work is focused on a high-risk of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia occurring in infants (patients diagnosed before their first birthday) with the KMT2A gene rearrangement. I routinely culture and maintain various leukemia cell lines, perform drug sensitivity assays, and analyze cellular responses to treatments.