Universitą degli studi di Pavia

My primary research interest is to investigate and characterize the pathways regulating Alternative Splicing that become deregulated in cancer. To this aim I use as an experimental model the Ron proto-oncogene. Ron is a tyrosine kinase receptor that controls processes occurring during the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), a cellular program involved in cancer progression and metastasis formation. My specific aim is to investigate the cis-element sequences and the splicing regulatory proteins involved in the control of the splicing isoform ΔRon, which up-regulation is able to activate the EMT process, leading to cell locomotion, and occurs in several epithelial cancers.