Federica Cavallo has a Ph.D. degree. She works as an Associate Professor of immunology (general pathology) at the University of Turin, Turin, Italy. She has a successful experience in basic and translational cancer immunotherapy, and has a considerable expertise in transgenic mouse models of cancer and DNA vaccination. Her pioneering work on the role of cytokines in the immune recognition and vaccines to prevent tumors is recognized worldwide. At present her lab is combining immune regulators of various kind and vaccines to prevent and cure autochthonous cancers in preclinical models. In the last few years, the lab focused mainly on DNA vaccination, testing how the way of DNA delivery affects the kind of immune mechanism activated. As these studies showed that in vivo electroporation is the most effective way for plasmid delivery, DNA vaccine electroporation has become the lab’s standard system. Identification of new tumor antigens playing a role in the progression through the succeeding stages of neoplastic transformation (oncoantigens), expressed either by tumor cells or by cells in the tumor microenvironment, is another central objective of the lab. A major effort is devoted to grab new knowledge on tumor and microenvironment transcriptome from microarray analysis and next generation sequencing data. These technologies are currently exploited to tease apart new mechanisms of carcinogenesis inhibition and to spot both miRNA and new oncoantigens to be exploited in a new generation of antitumor vaccines. Cavallo is the author/coauthor of several highly quoted papers published in high impact journals (ISI Web of Science Thomson Reuters, h index: 31). The complete list of scientific publications is available at http://www.researcherid.com/rid/C-5666-2011.
Biography Updated on 8 September 2012