FACULTY

COORDINATOR

Antonia Follenzi

FULL PROFESSOR in HISTOLOGY

Antonia Follenzi, MD, PhD is the Head of the Laboratory of Histology at the Department of Health Sciences, Università del Piemonte Orientale, Novara (Italy). She received her degree in Medicine and Surgery in March 1992 from the University of Turin-Italy, where she also completed her residency in Clinical Pathology (1997) and the PhD program in Human Oncology (2001). After post-doctoral training at Weizmann Institute in Israel (1996-1997) and the Liver research Center at Einstein College of Medicine in New York, she joined the University of Piemonte Orientale in 2006. Her laboratory is mainly involved in the cell and gene therapy of Hemophilia A and the characterization of transcriptional targeting of FVIII expression in endothelial cells using endothelial specific promoters to limit immune responses to the transgene.

Moreover, at the University of Piemonte Orientale she set up the technology of producing patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from hematopoietic cells and differentiating them into endothelial cells that, after LV genetic correction were able to secrete FVIII and, once transplanted, able to correct the bleeding phenotype of hemophilic mice. Lately her work is focused on the extra-coagulative roles of FVIII on endothelial cell biology.