LNCIB

Stefan Schoeftner is Principle Investigator of the Genomic Stability Group at the Consorzio per le Biotecnologie – Laboratorio Nazionale (LNCIB, Trieste), and Associate Professor in Molecular Biology at the the University of Trieste, Department of Life Sciences.
Schoeftner studied Biology at the University of Vienna (Austria). He obtained the PhD from the same University, working at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
He performed his post-doctoral research at the Spanish National Cancer Center (CNIO) in Madrid and in Italy at LNCIB, in Trieste. He opened his independent research group at the Italian National Cancer Research Institute, Regina Elena in Rome (Italy) in 2011. In 2013 Stefan Schoeftner transferred his research group to LNCIB in Trieste. Since 2015 he has been holding the position of Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Trieste, Department of Life Sciences.

The research interest of Stefan Schoeftner has been focused on understanding key processes that impact on the stability and structure of the cancer genome and the development of novel, cell based tools for cancer research.
During his career Stefan Schoeftner discovered mechanisms that coordinate the inactivation of chromatin structures of an entire chromosome, a process called X inactivation (Schoeftner et al. EMBO Journal, 2006). He investigated the mechanism that links chromatin structure to the mechanisms that ensure the stability of DNA sequences, named telomeres, that protect the ends of chromosomes (Schoeftner et al. PNAS 2009). Further, he discovered RNA molecules derived from transcription of telomeres and having an impact on protecting the their function (Schoeftner and Blasco, Nat Cell Biol, 2008). Later on, his team identified a role for small RNAs, so called miRNAs, in controlling telomere and genomic stability in human breast cancer cells (Dinami et al. Cancer Res 2014, Dinami et al. 2017). More recently, collaborative efforts with Roberta Benetti (University of Udine, Italy) unraveled a mechanism that controls the identity and genomic stability of stem cells and cancer cells (Scarola et al. Nat Comm 2015; Commiso et al. Oncotarget 2017).

To date he has authored 18 peer-reviewed scientific publications including research articles and reviews. In addition, Stefan Schoeftner is holding a patent on the use of telomeric transcripts as diagnostic and therapeutic agent (PCT/EP2008/010661).

Mariangela Santorsola is a postdoctoral researcher at LNCIB, Trieste, since July 2017, with a Master’s Degree in Biological Science at University of Bari. She received her research training in Bioinformatics from the University of Sannio and Institute for Biomedical Technologies - National Research Council (ITB-CNR), Italy.
Her research interests are focused on application of bioinformatics methods in human cancer genomics.
During her PhD research, she focused on the investigation of variants underlying tumors and mitochondrial disorders (Vidone et al. Int J Biochem Cell Biol. 2015). She developed a phylogeny-based method to prioritise mitochondrial variants of clinical interest (Santorsola et al. Hum Genet 2016) and contributed to developing and maintaining databases and tools for analysis of High-Throughput Sequencing data (e.g. Whole Exome and Genome Sequencing data) (Clima et al. Nucleic Acids Res. 2017; Calabrese et al. Bioinformatics 2014).
As a postdoctoral fellow at ITB-CNR, she was involved in the development of a pipeline to support metagenomics data analysis.

She co-authored 6 scientific publications on ISI-impacted journals.

Odessa Schillaci is a postdoctoral researcher of the Genomic Stability Group of Professor Stefan Schoeftner at LNCIB, in Trieste.
She obtained her international PhD in Immuno-Pharmacology from the University of Palermo. She had her research training at the Department of Biopathology and Medical Biotechnologies (University of Palermo, Italy), at the Laboratory Medicine, Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute (Los Angeles, USA), and at the Department of Biological, Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Technologies (University of Palermo, Italy).

Odessa Schillaci joined Professor Schoeftner’s laboratory in May 2017 to study and develop conditions for the cultivation, molecular characterization and conservation of lung and mesothelium tumor-organoids to provide a rational for efforts in defining strategies for precision cancer therapies in an experimental laboratory setting.

During her PhD she focused her attention on the identification of the molecular mechanisms underlying intercellular communication in cancer. She was involved in the isolation, molecular characterization and functional roles of tumor-derived exosomes and other extracellular vesicles, recently emerged as important mediators of the horizontal propagation of oncogenic signaling locally and at distance (Raimondi et al. Oncotarget, 2015; Schillaci et. al Scientific Reports, 2017).

With her research, Odessa Schillaci contributed to understand the mechanism of intercellular communication in cancer by demonstrating that tumor derived exosomes positively regulate metastasis not only by favoring the development of pre-metastatic niches that allow tumor growth in secondary sites, but also by inducing a rush of the initial steps of the metastatic cascade already in primary tumor sites, where heterogeneous sub-clones co-exist (Schillaci et. al Scientific Reports, 2017).

To date she has authored 6 peer-reviewed scientific publications.