Vincenzo Calvanese

Biography

Dr. Vincenzo Calvanese started working on human stem cells during his PhD at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) and the Spanish National Biotechnology Centre (CNB), in Madrid, Spain, where he described several epigenetic pathways involved in embryonic stem cell differentiation, directed by Dr. Mario Fraga. After obtaining a PhD in molecular biology from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 2010, he pursued a postdoctoral career in California, USA. Vincenzo’s first postdoc experience was aimed of understanding the epigenetic regulation of HIV latency, in Dr. Eric Verdin lab at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco. In 2012 he joined Hanna Mikkola’s group at Broad Stem Cell Research Center in UCLA, for the study of gene regulation of human hematopoietic stem cells. First as postdoc and later (from 2016) as project scientist in Mikkola’s group, he pursued several research lines focused on key areas of human HSC biology. He used a developmental viewpoint, dissecting human HSC generation in vivo and in vitro, as well as a molecular viewpoint, identifying key markers and gene regulation states of HSC stemness. In April 2021, Vincenzo was appointed Junior Group Leader of the Stem Cell Self-Renewal in Hematopoiesis lab at the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London (LMCB-UCL), UK, where he was awarded a Sir Henry Dale research fellowship (Wellcome/Royal Society) to study novel aspects of HSC self-renewal regulation at the crossroad of epigenetics, transcription and metabolism. In 2024, the Calvanese group opens a new location to the Josep Carreras Institute, funded by a Consolidator grant (ERC), an ATRAE grant (Spanish Government) and further support by the Josep Carreras Foundation and the Generalitat de Catalunya, to expand his studies on human HSC and devise new methods to obtain functional cells in vitro to treat leukaemia and other blood diseases.