Dr. Maria Giovanna Francipane is a Principal Investigator in Regenerative Medicine at Fondazione Ri.MED (Palermo, Italy), an international partnership between the Italian Government, the Region of Sicily, the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the University of Pittsburgh, and UPMC.

Dr. Francipane received her BS and MS degrees in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Palermo in 2004 and 2006, respectively, and obtained a PhD in Immunopharmacology in 2010 from the same university. Since 2011, Dr. Francipane has been with the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, serving as a post-doc in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Lagasse until 2015, then moving into a Research Associate position (2016), before she was appointed as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology in 2017. Dr. Francipane kept her faculty position until July 2020, when she decided to move back to Palermo and embark on a new project. Since September 2020, Dr. Francipane is working in the laboratories of Ri.MED’s Regenerative Medicine and Biomedical Technologies Unit at IRCCS-ISMETT. Her short-term goal is to design, implement and lead novel physiological and disease-relevant cell culture systems for tissue engineering of the hepatobiliary system.

Dr. Francipane has direct experience and expertise in a broad range of assays, models, and techniques across end-stage organ failure, solid organ transplantation, regenerative medicine/tissue engineering, and oncology, as evidenced by several publications in peer-reviewed journals, including but not limited to, Cancer Research, Cell Death & Differentiation, Journal of Immunology, The American Journal of Pathology, Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, STEM CELLS Translational Medicine.

Dr. Francipane is a reviewer for several journals including but not limited to, JCI Insight, Cancers, Cells, The FASEB Journal, Oncotarget, Stem Cell Research & Therapy, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Stem Cell Research, Cell Transplantation, Life Sciences, Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, Experimental Biology and Medicine, OncoTargets and Therapy.

View a list of Dr. Francipane’s publications here.