Dr. Arianna Giacomini is a university researcher and assistant professor in General Pathology at the Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine of the University of Brescia. Dr. Giacomini graduated in Medical Biotechnologies and Molecular Medicine and received her Ph.D. in Biotechnologies applied to the Medical Sciences at the University of Milan. She has a long-lasting experience in experimental oncology (including in vitro and in vivo studies on tumor growth, metastasis and tumor angiogenesis) and in the identification/validation of new antitumor therapeutic approaches and molecules.
She started her activity in cancer research in 2004 at the National Cancer Institute of Milan (Prof. C. Carlo-Stella’s laboratory). There, she developed an adoptive cell therapy approach in hematologic cancers by using CD34+ cells engineered to express the pro-apoptotic protein TRAIL. In 2012, she was awarded a fellowship from the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research to study the antiangiogenic and antitumor activity of long-pentraxin PTX3 at Prof. M. Presta’s laboratory in Brescia. In this lab, she studied the role of angiogenic factors in tumor growth and angiogenesis, focusing on PTX3 and the fibroblast growth factor (FGF/FGFR) system. These research activities led to the characterization of PTX3 as a natural pan-FGF trap and the identification of the first FGF-blocking small molecule for cancer therapy (Cancer Cell, 2015). For these studies, Dr. Giacomini was awarded the Elena Cappannini Prize at the 2016 meeting of the Italian Cancer Society for the best paper published in 2015 about innovative therapeutic anti-tumor approaches. In 2016 she was funded by Cariplo Foundation to study the therapeutic potential of extracellular FGF traps for the treatment of multiple myeloma. For these studies, Dr. Giacomini was awarded the Young Investigator award at the 2019 meeting of the German Cancer Society.
Currently, Dr. Giacomini is head of the research group “New targets and therapeutic approaches for hematologic malignancies” at the Department of Molecular and Translational Medicine of the University of Brescia.