ITALIAN SCIENTISTS & SCHOLARS IN NORTH AMERICA FOUNDATION
Connecting, Empowering, Celebrating the Italian Intellectual Diaspora
Paola Campese Award
2024
WINNER
Gabriele Casirati
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston Children's Hospital
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.
Gabriele Casirati earned his M.D. from Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy and completed his 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 to pursue a career in basic and translational research. There, he investigated the role of miRNA-126 in acute myeloid leukemia and explored intratumoral heterogeneity using single-cell RNA sequencing of primary patient samples.
From 2020 to 2023, he served as a research fellow at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he developed an epitope editing approach to enhance immunotherapy for acute myeloid leukemia (published in Nature). He also obtained a Ph.D. in molecular and translational medicine from Università Milano-Bicocca. Currently, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts. His research focuses on developing innovative gene-editing strategies to improve targeted immunotherapies for hematological malignancies, enhance non-genotoxic conditioning regimens for bone marrow transplantation, and devise new methods to eradicate acute myeloid leukemia cells.