Sheer passion and ambition
So, why dedicate a career to pancreatic cancer research? “I want to make a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer less scary than it is today. I want to give patients options that, at the moment, they don’t have.”
“I went to university and studied Biology to become an ethologist – the study of animal behaviour. Sadly, cancer touched my life during my second year when someone close was diagnosed with cancer and passed away. The cancer took away her love for life before taking her life, and I still struggle thinking about that,” she says.
“I was thus faced with the choice to either continue my path or dedicate my passion and life to cancer research. I chose the latter.”
Giulia carried out her PhD at the CRUK Cambridge Institute, although in a very different field from the one she is in now. But it is that difference, that multi-disciplinary nature of her career which she says has been pivotal to her current work. “I think being in a chemistry-based lab influenced me to become interested in understanding cell-cell interactions and signalling mechanisms almost at the molecular level. So, from my PhD to post-doc was when I chose pancreatic cancer as my focus.”
As her research on the cross talk between pancreatic malignant cells and fibroblasts develops, Giulia also stresses the importance of moving from a map to a manual.
“It has been incredibly rewarding to observe how our initial work on CAF heterogeneity has initiated an expanding excitement and hype for this area. However, to get there, it is now important for the field to go beyond the description of this heterogeneity and move towards its functional understanding.”
“Indeed, discrimination between ‘’drivers’’ of the disease and ‘’passengers’’ reprogrammed by the malignant cells will be key, and we are working on this” she says.
