Dr. Giuliano Bonfa’, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher in the Synthetic and Systems Biology Lab for Biomedicine (Synbio Lab, coordinated by Velia Siciliano, PhD), at the Center for Advanced Biomaterials for Healthcare (CABHCRIB-IIT Naples, Italy). He has a strong background in immunology and cell culture assays. Dr. Bonfa’ has also “hands on” experience in cancer research, CRISPR/Cas9 technology and 3D spheroids acquired in preview works also as postdoc (MedImmune/Astrazeneca and Butatan Institute). In 2019, he joined the Synbio Lab atCABHCRIB-IIT to lead a project aiming at applying bioengineering approaches for improved CAR-T therapy. So far, he has acquired extensive experience with synthetic and systems biology, Lentivirus work and supervising a PhD student, a fellow and a master student.  

At Synbio Lab Giuliano coordinate the project to generate synthetic promoters that are strictly activated by T cell exhaustion specific transcription factors (TF). We have been studying TF specifically involved in the T cell exhaustion phenotype found in tumor and chronic viral infection contexts.  The TF binding sites (TF-BSs) are cloned in the synthetic promoter construct upstream different minimal promoters to control the expression of mCherry fluorescent protein. These T cell exhaustion-specific synthetic promoters will represent a genetic input-device that once integrated into the genome of exhausted T cells, will drive the expression of reporter genes or therapeutic genes able to revert the exhaustion phenotype in the tumor microenvironment.