Eugenio Montini

Dr. Eugenio Montini started his scientific career in 1995 in human molecular and medical genetics at the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine (TIGEM, Milan, Italy). Later, he worked as postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Markus Grompe (Oregon Health Science University, Portland, USA), in the field of liver gene therapy and liver regeneration, In 2003, he joined Luigi Naldini’s laboratory at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget, Milan, Italy) to investigate the oncogenic potential of self-inactivating Lentiviral Vector (SIN-LV) integration in vivo and to identify the factors that modulate the genotoxicity of integrating vectors in general. He is now a tenured group leader of a research unit and head of the Vector Integration Core in SR-Tiget. His main scientific contributions include the demonstration that SIN-LV vectors have a superior safety profile over gamma-retroviral vectors, which has resulted in the adoption of SIN-LVs as the preferred platform for therapeutic gene delivery internationally. He also developed state of the art high throughput retrieval and next generation sequencing of vector insertion sites, methods to study the long-range interactions between vector and cellular genome and a solid bioinformatics and statistical framework to analyze and integrate genomic and phenotypic data.