2023 - NICOLA ACETO
ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Motivation
Nicola Aceto is Professor of Molecular Oncology at the ETH Zurich, where he leads an international team of cancer researchers focused on answering questions that pertain to the metastatic process in various cancer types. Recent discoveries of the Aceto lab include important insights into the biological features and vulnerabilities of metastasis-forming circulating tumor cells, some of which already translated in clinical trials for patients with metastatic breast cancer.
Prior to ETH Zurich, he has been Swiss National Science Foundation Assistant Professor of Oncology at the University of Basel. Earlier, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Haber lab at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Boston, MA, USA, where he identified circulating tumor cell clusters as metastatic precursors. He has also been an active member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA, USA. He received a PhD summa cum laude from the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) in Basel, Switzerland with a thesis on protein tyrosine phosphatases and their role in breast cancer.
Professor Aceto received several awards related to his work on circulating tumor cells, including the highly prestigious Swiss Science Prize Latsis for groundbreaking cancer research (2021) as well as the Friedrich Miescher Award for Outstanding Achievements in Biochemistry (2020). He is an inventor in several patent applications related to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, and co-founder of an ETH spin-off company dedicated to developing new anticancer treatments.
