Advancing Research in Hematological Malignancies and Immunotherapy

Dr. Gabriele Casirati, Research Fellow at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital, has been honored with the 2024 ISSNAF Young Investigator Paola Campese Award.

Dr. Casirati earned his M.D. from Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy and completed hematology training at Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan. During the final two years of his residency, he joined Dr. Bernhard Gentner's lab, where he began a career in basic and translational research. His work focused on studying the role of miRNA-126 in acute myeloid leukemia and analyzing intratumoral heterogeneity using single-cell RNA sequencing of primary patient samples.

Between 2020 and 2023, Dr. Casirati served as a research fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he pioneered an epitope-editing approach to enhance immunotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia, culminating in a publication in Nature. During this period, he also completed a Ph.D. in molecular and translational medicine at Università Milano-Bicocca.

Currently, Dr. Casirati is a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. His work focuses on developing innovative gene-editing technologies to improve targeted immunotherapies for hematological malignancies, refining non-genotoxic conditioning regimens for bone marrow transplantation, and designing novel strategies to eradicate acute myeloid leukemia cells.

Below is the jury's statement recognizing Dr. Casirati as this year’s awardee.

"Dr. Gabriele Casirati is awarded the ISSNAF Paola Campese Award for his exceptional achievements as a young physician-scientist and the clinical potential of his innovative research. He developed a gene-editing approach to introduce precise amino acid changes in healthy hematopoietic stem cells, improving their use in transplantation. His work addresses the challenges of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a resistant hematological malignancy, by focusing on epitope editing of stem cells. This approach enhances chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy against leukemic cells while protecting normal precursors essential for blood production, reducing treatment toxicity."