Dr. Elena Catanzaro (lab of Prof. Dmitri Krysko) receives prestigious EU-Horizon-Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

The EU-Horizon-Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships (MSCA) represent one of the most prestigious and respected fellowships in the EU with a success rate of about 17% this year. Dr. Elena Catanzaro is one of the 8 successful researchers at UGent who received the MSCA fellowship and the only one affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Elena will perform her research at the “Cell Death and Investigation Therapy” Laboratory headed by Prof. Dmitri Krysko. Her project, "PDT-NEO-immunother", aims to lay the foundation for personalized antitumor vaccine design and increase patients' responsiveness to anti-cancer therapy based on photodynamic therapy and immunogenic cell death.

Elena is an Italian postdoctoral fellow specialized in anti-cancer pharmacology and immunology. She gained her Ph.D. at the University of Bologna in 2018 with a thesis about the ability of natural compounds to induce an immunogenic type of cancer cell death. She has a remarkable track record, as demonstrated by the 33 published articles and corroborated by many national and international prizes. Elena was awarded for the best pharmacological research by the Italian Society of Pharmacology and Farmindustria in 2018 and in 2021 by the “Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer” (Web of Science impact facor 13,75) for the best basic tumor immunology paper. Thus, the MSCA fellowship represents an outstanding opportunity for Dr. Catanzaro to focus on her research and cultivate her scientific maturity in the “Cell Death Investigation and Therapy” Laboratory at the Department of Human Sturcture and Repair at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at UGent and in Cancer Research Institute Ghent (CRIG).