Dr. Elena Mariotto

Curriculum Vitae

Scopus ID: 56600807400
Since the beginning of my career, my research interests have focused on a comprehensive understanding of key molecular pathways that sustain tumor drug resistance and the identification of promising anticancer drugs for pediatric cancers. My academic training and research experience have provided me with an excellent background in multiple biological disciplines including molecular and cell biology, as well as preclinical drug screening across different tumor types. I graduated in 2013 in both Health Biology (University of Padova, Italy) and in Genetics (Paris Diderot University, France) within the European Double degree program, and then I obtained the Ph.D. in Developmental Medicine and Health Planning Sciences, Pediatric Oncohematology Unit – Dept. of Women’s and Children’s Health (University of Padova, 2017). During my training, I have had the opportunity to work in different environment, such as the Institut Universitaire d’Hematologie (IUH) (Paris, France), the Centro di Riferimento Oncologico (CRO) (Aviano, Italy), the Pediatric Research Institute (IRP) and the University of Padova (UNIPD, Italy), resulting in a solid national and international network of collaborations.
The last five years of my post doctoral career have been focused on fighting Medulloblastoma chemotherapy resistance by establishing a novel ex vivo model of drug resistance by exposing patient-derived Medulloblastoma (PD-MB) cells to high-dose chemotherapy, funded in part by the Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sul Cancro (AIRC, Italy – 2020-2022) and the Rally Foundation for Childhood Cancer Research (US, 2021-2022). Moreover, the strong pharmacological background that I cultivated during my Post doctoral training encouraged me to develop from scratch an up-to-date High-Throughput drug Screening (HTS) platform to test more than 3500 drugs within the Academic research context (Mariotto E. et al. Acta Neuropathol Commun, 2023). I am currently Junior PI of the High-Throughput Drug Screening for Precision Oncology Lab at the Pediatric Research Institute thanks to i) the competitive Supporting TAlent in ReSearch (STARS@UNIPD) Starting Grant (University of Padova, 2022-2024) to explore more realistic culturing conditions to closely mimic the peculiar brain tumor microenvironment to unveil hidden metabolic synthetic lethal drugs, and ii) the intramural IRP-Starting Grant (Pediatric Research Institute, 2024-2027) for a personalized medicine approach to test the sensitivity to chemotherapy of patient-derived cancer cells collected at the University Hospital of Padova.