Dr. Francesca Demichelis has expertise in the area of cancer genomics that builds on more than ten years of interdisciplinary work especially in the field of solid tumors.
Dr. Demichelis the leader of the Computational Oncology Laboratory at the Centre for Integrative Biology at the University of Trento, has her laboratory which includes computational and experimental post-docs and Ph.D. students with focus on the characterization of cancer evolution and progression and on the identification of germline and somatic diagnostic and prognostic cancer biomarkers.
Dr. Demichelis’ laboratory recently developed a framework to chart tumor evolution maps exploiting the clonality information of cell populations (Baca S et al, Cell 2013; Prandi D et al, Genome Biology 2014). Application to cell-free DNA allowed her laboratory to monitor lethal prostate cancer dynamics (Carreira S et al, Sci Transl Med. 2014) and to study response to second-generation anti-AR treatment in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients (Romanel A, et al. Sci Transl Med. 2015).
Dr. Demichelis was recently awarded a five year European Research Council investigator grant to nominate synthetic lethal combinations that exploits the analytical and computational experience her team built.
In the past three years, her group actively worked on the definition of the molecular determinants of cell plasticity and AR-independent prostate cancer interrogating genomics, transcriptomics and epigenetics in collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine (NY), the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard University (Beltran H, Prandi D et al, Nat Med. 2016) and Memorial Sloane Kettering (Mu P. et al, Science 2017).
Funded activities in cancer research include collaborative work with the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard University (MA), and the University Hospital Innsbruck (Austria), The Institute of Cancer Research (UK) and Weill Cornell Medicine (NY). In 2009-2010 Dr. Demichelis was awarded a Developmental Project Award from the Dana-Farber Harvard Cancer Center Prostate Cancer SPORE.