Saverio Prof. Alberti

Saverio Alberti is Co-Director of the Unit of Cancer Pathology, Center of Excellence for Research on Aging, University “G. D’ Annunzio”, Chieti. He obtained his MD degree in 1979 and specialty in Clinical Oncology from the Ferrara University School of Medicine, Italy. In 1982 he became PhD in Pharmacological Research at the Institute Mario Negri, Milano, Italy and in 1986 he became Fellow in Genetics, after a 4-year post-doc in the Department of Genetics of Stanford University, CA. His past experience includes sabbaticals c/o Sir Peter Medawar, Transplantation Biology Section of the CRC (Harrow, UK), Hiromitsu Nakauchi, Human Frontier Science Institute - RIKEN (Tsukuba, Japan), Joseph Schlessinger, New York University (New York, USA) and Ivan Morrison, ILRAD (Nairobi, Kenia). He has acquired deep experience in molecular biology, and regulation of gene expression and genome stability by DNA methylation. He is internationally recognized leader in the field of research on Trop molecules. His research group has cloned the genes, biochemically characterized Trop-1 and -2, and identified their function as stimulators of tumor cell growth and metastatic spreading. He also pioneered the development of software for the identification of fusion oncogenes and of transcription factors-DNA binding sites. Additional achievements in experimental oncology bear to the function of cell-cell adhesion molecules in signal transduction, cancer invasion and metastasis, and in the discovery that p53 regulates DNA methylation and subsequent genome stability. This was extended to the study of the prognostic / predictive relevance of the markers above in human breast cancer. Scientific experience includes next-generation sequencing, DNA array and proteome analysis. He holds 11 patents on cancer therapeutics and biotech applications to cancer diagnosis.