Romina Gamberale
IMEX-CONICET-Academia Nacional de Medicina
Argentina
Romina Gamberale, Ph.D, is currently Co-Director of the Laboratory of Inmunología Oncológica of the Institute of Experimental Medicine (IMEX) from the National Council on Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) at the National Academy of Medicine (ANM) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She attended University of Buenos Aires where she majored in Cellular Biology in 1998. While being a Ph.D. student she obtained a Fellow from the French Society of Immunology to study the role of the tyrosine kinase Syk in dendritic cell maturation under the supervision of Dr. Sebastián Amigorena in Curie Institute at Paris, France. Dr. Gamberale received her Ph.D. in Cellular Biology in 2002 at the University of Buenos Aires studying the role of the microenvironment in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) under the mentorship of Dr. Mirta Giordano. She then obtained a postdoctoral fellow from CONICET and a fellow from Fundación Bunge & Born (Argentina) to attend to the Unité d´Immuno-hematologie et Immunopathologie at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, under the supervision of Dr. Guillermo Dighiero. She currently published more than 45 papers on peer-reviewed journals focused on immunology and hematology.
Dr. Gamberale is teaching Immunology at the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires since 1998 and she currently participates in the Research and Teaching Committee of the IMEX-CONICET-ANM (2012-present). She participated in the Executive Committee of the Argentinean Society of Immunology (2015-2016) and in the Scientific Committee of the Argentinean Society of Hematology (2014-2015) and the Iberoamerican Meeting on CLL (2018).
Research Focus:
Romina Gamberale is currently an Independent Research group Leader of CONICET (Argentina) and her group is focused on CLL, particularly in how leukemic cells and immune cells of the microenvironment affect each other. Her group reported that BTK inhibitor, ibrutinib, impairs the phagocytosis of rituximab-coated leukemic cells from CLL patients by human macrophages (Haematologica 2015) and, more recently, they found that SYK inhibitor, entospletinib, also affects the phagocytosis and inhibits T cell activation in CLL patients (Cancer Immunol Immunother 2017). They are now studying the role of the tumor microenvironment in the resistance of CLL cells to the BCL-2 inhibitors, venetoclax (Haematologica 2018). Since they previously reported that sphingosine kinase 1 (SphK1) plays a key role in CLL survival, activation and proliferation (Haematologica 2017), they are now studying the use of SphKs inhibitors in combined therapies as a promising treatment option for CLL.