Melania Franchini
Melania is a Medical Biotechnologist (BS 2016, MS 2018) who completed her PhD in Computational Biology (2024) at the University of Naples, Italy. Her doctoral research focused on investigating vulnerabilities in EGFR-dependent breast cancer cells using single-cell lineage tracing and time-resolved computational analyses.
In early 2024, Melania joined Dr. Andrea Califano’s Lab in the Department of Systems Biology, where she is currently undertaking her postdoctoral training. Her research focuses on developing pharmacological strategies to combat drug resistance in rare pediatric sarcomas by identifying drugs targeting Tumor Checkpoint modules. Additionally, she is investigating tumor microenvironment (TME) remodeling in prostate cancer to uncover mechanisms that sustain immunosuppression following Master Regulators directed treatments.
PhD in Computational and Quantitative Biology, University of Naples, Italy
M.S. in Medical Biotechnology, University of Naples, Italy
B.S. in Biotechnology for Health, University of Naples, Italy
Franchini M, Pellecchia S, Viscido G, Gambardella G. Single-cell gene set enrichment analysis and transfer learning for functional annotation of scRNA-seq data. NAR Genom Bioinform. 2023 Mar 3;5(1):lqad024.
Pellecchia S, Viscido G, Franchini M, Gambardella G. Predicting drug response from single-cell expression profiles of tumours. BMC Med. 2023 Dec 1;21(1):476.
Pellecchia S, Franchini M, Viscido G, Arnese R, Gambardella G. Single cell lineage tracing reveals clonal dynamics of anti-EGFR therapy resistance in triple negative breast cancer. Genome Med. 2024 Apr 11;16(1):55.