Maria Giovanna Francipane, PhD

Dr. Maria Giovanna Francipane is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Francipane also serves as a Principal Investigator of the Fondazione RiMED. RiMED is an international partnership between the Italian Government, the Region of Sicily, the Italian National Research Council (CNR), the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), aiming to establish a UPMC-managed world-class facility (the Biomedical Research and Biotechnology Center, BRBC) in Palermo, Italy. Dr. Francipane’s mission at the BRBC will be to establish a kidney tissue engineering laboratory. Dr. Francipane graduated from her PhD in Immunopharmacology from the University of Palermo, Italy, after obtaining a BS in Biotechnology, and an MS in Medical Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine, from the same University. Since 2011, Dr. Francipane has been working in the laboratory of Eric Lagasse, PharmD, PhD, at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where she first served as a post-doc (2011-2015), then as a Research Associate (2016), and lately, she has been serving as a Research Assistant Professor (2017). Dr. Francipane’s background includes several years of research with significant expertise in cellular and molecular biology applications, as evidenced by several first author publications in peer-reviewed journals. In the Lagasse laboratory, after working on a project that investigated the modulation of the mTOR pathway to deplete cancer stem cells in human colorectal cancer, Dr. Francipane focused on a project investigating lymph node’s ability to support the functional maturation of candidate cell sources for kidney tissue engineering. Dr. Francipane has served as a journal reviewer for:

• Cell Transplantation
• Stem Cell Research
• Stem Cell Research and Therapy
• Oncotarget
• Current Pharmacogenomics & Personalized Medicine
• The Scientific Pages of Nephrology
• The Scientific Pages of Stem Cell Research
• The Scientific Pages of Translational Medicine

 Dr. Francipane is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), the American Society of Nephrology (ASN), and the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR). View a list of Dr. Francipane’s publications here.