Francesco Chemello is an Italian scientist who specializes in genome editing of muscle diseases. He obtained his PhD from University of Padua (UNIPD, Padua, Italy). During his PhD and postdoc in the Laboratory of Functional Genomics of Prof. Gerolamo Lanfranchi at UNIPD he developed his interest in the study of muscle biology. There, he focused on the post-transcriptional regulation of the metabolism of the different fiber types of skeletal muscle. Later, to further his study of muscle diseases, he moved to UT Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW, Dallas, USA), where he focused his work on one of the most devastating skeletal muscle diseases, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). In the laboratory of Prof. Eric N. Olson, Francesco deployed the most recent genome editing technologies, base editing and prime editing, to fix mutations causing DMD in animal models and in patient-derived cells.

He returns to Italy as an MSCA fellow to develop new genome editing based strategies with the aim of correcting clinically relevant cardiomyopathy-causing mutations using the next-generation model of human cardiac organoids. The project will be developed at the Department of Biology of UNIPD under the supervision of Prof. Milena Bellin.