Via Francesco Chiesa 5
6500 Bellinzona, Switzerland
Antonino Cassotta obtained his Master’s degree in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Rome in 2013, where he worked on antigen presentation in the lab of Prof. Rosa Sorrentino. Then, he moved to Switzerland where he obtained his PhD in Immunology in 2020 at the ETH Zürich under the mentorship of Prof. Federica Sallusto at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) in Bellinzona. In recognition of the excellence of his doctoral studies, in 2021 he received the Prize for the best PhD thesis in Life Sciences awarded by SAIS (Società degli Accademici italiani in Svizzera) and co-sponsored by the Embassy of Italy. During his postdoctoral training, he co-led two projects aimed at dissecting the immunodominance and persistence of T cells targeting SARS-CoV-2 and Influenza virus which resulted in two publications as co-last author. To refine his training, in 2021 Dr. Cassotta joined the lab of Prof. Antonio Lanzavecchia at the National Institute of Molecular Genetics (INGM) in Milan, Italy. During his career, Dr. Cassotta investigated various aspects of the human adaptive immune response to microbes, biological drugs, and self-antigens. Among his findings, he identified the epitopes recognized by T and B cells targeting viruses and bacteria causing human infections and showed that antigen processing is the major driver of T cell immunodominance, with implications for the design of improved vaccines. Since 2024, he is a Research Associate at the IRB, where he started independent lines of research aimed at investigating the role of the immune system in cardiovascular diseases.
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