Lucrezia Camicia is a researcher at the CRO in Aviano, in Veneto, where she studies a specific molecule (multimerin-2) that normally maintains blood vessels healthy, but is degraded in tumors, particularly ovarian and colon cancers: “I received the fellowship right after my PhD, and it was a crucial moment to give continuity to my research […]. Without it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to carry out this project.”
Maria Valeria Giuli from La Sapienza University, Rome — who is currently in the second year of her Pezcoller fellowship in memory of Ferruccio and Elena Bernardi — explains why this type of funding is essential: “Within universities, securing a tenure-track position is very difficult, and professors often lack sufficient financial resources to retain researchers after their PhD. Without fellowships and external funding, we as researchers would often lack the means to carry on with our work.”
Elisa Marmocchi, on the other hand, is a PhD student at the CIBIO Department of the University of Trento, where, thanks to the 3-year Marina Larcher Fogazzaro PhD fellowship she studies “cold” tumors such as prostate cancer:
“We are looking for a way to recruit the immune system against the tumor. We work to identify new molecules present on tumor cells […], called antigens, which could become the target for a therapeutic vaccine.”
