There is not a recipe, but there are circumstances and opportunities

Before coming to Padua, Alessandra Biffi was working on gene therapy at the Boston Children Hospital. “Padua could have been the right place after Boston to develop my research and clinical interests” says Alessandra Biffi. Now she is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Padua, head of the clinic for oncohematological pediatrics and hematopoietic stem cell transplant at the university hospital, she is also head of a research group at the Pediatric Research Institute in Padua where she works on hematopoiteic cells & gene therapy. During her career she received many awards and grants, among which, this year, an ERC Advanced Grant. 

Valentina Poletti is junior PI at the Pediatric Research Institute in Padua, she was awarded an MSCA Individual Fellowship and she works under Prof. Biffi’s supervision. They’ve met in Boston: “I met Prof. Biffi three years before coming back to Padua” says Valentina Poletti. “I started working with her in her group in Boston. I started working on something relatively new for me in gene therapy, a new application in a field I never touched before, that is neurometabolic diseases. I really liked it and I was very fascinated, so I decided to move here in Padua to join her group. I think it is the place to be for gene therapy”.

Of course there is not a single recipe to get awarded an ERC Advanced Grant, but the right time, a good idea and a lot of enthusiasm can be good ingredients. “There is not a recipe, but there are circumstances and opportunities” says Prof. Biffi. “In my case the opportunity was a very peculiar moment in the field I applied to. We had a very unexpected finding and, by serendipity, we discovered a location in the genome where gene editing could be very instrumental for us to empower our gene therapy strategy. I was enthusiastic about the idea and the project we have been developing, so we tried and probably we have also been lucky”. 

For Valentina the recipe was very similar: “a strong project at the right time, and, i think, a very good idea, supported by very promising results. Regarding my future plans, obviously I would like to enter the tenure track here at the University of Padua, conclude my project and start a novel one on the same track”.

Watch the video to learn more.