Piaggio Giulia

Since her postdoc at EMBL she is interested in gene expression transcriptional regulation during cell proliferation and transformation. Her work lead to the identification 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, she identified a complex between mutant p53 protein, NF-Y transcription factor and p300 protein having a role in chromatin state and gene expression regulation following DNA damage. She developed a transgenic mouse model to follow physiological and pathological proliferation events by bioluminescence in vivo imaging. This animal model has been sold in Europe 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 ratio as prognostic biomarkers of endometrial cancer (EC). 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 results and their publication in peer reviewed journals. Since 1994, she is responsible of public and private grant research projects and is the tutor of PhD students.
She also helps the grantoffice activities:
-responsible for the annual report of the IRE scientific activities to the MoH.
-part of the working group for the institutional strategy of procedure for publication of scientific articles which includes the rules of raw data storage and and analysis of research integrity.
-member of the IRE Patent Commette