Full professorship at ETH Zurich granted to Prof. Dr. Andrea Alimonti
Institutional Communication Service
Professor Andrea Alimonti, MD, group leader at the Institute of Oncology Research (IOR, affiliated with USI) and Full professor at the USI Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, has been appointed by the ETH Board as Full professor of Experimental oncology and translational cancer medicine at the ETH Zurich. The appointment, which will take effect on 1 January 2020, is part of the ETH-USI dual professorship agreement.
The work of Andrea Alimonti focuses on the characterization of a novel type of cellular senescence induced in cancer cells, aiming at developing the concept of pro-senescence therapy for cancer and combining them with drugs to enhance the anti-tumor activity of the immune system, which will also allow the identification of senescence markers in human tumor samples to be used in clinic.
Prof. Alimonti, who has already received prestigious awards (among others, two European Research Grants in 2010 and 2015, the Steiner Cancer Research Award in 2015 and, this year, the Robert Wenner Prize for young cancer researchers awarded by the Swiss Cancer League - Krebsliga [www.usi.ch/en/feeds/11502]), was recently awarded the 2019 PCF Challenge Award (conferred by the PCF Prostate Cancer Foundation, the leading U.S. agency in the field) for his work that presents an innovative methodology capable of countering the evolution of prostate cancer, and whose findings are the subject of clinical studies based on innovative immunotherapies carried out at the international level (www.usi.ch/en/feeds/11331).
By appointing Andrea Alimonti to a dual professorship with the Università della Svizzera italiana, ETH Zurich is filling a gap in the field of oncology and thus creating a link between clinical and basic research.
As USI Rector Boas Erez points out, this appointment "further consolidates the relations established over the last decade with the ETH Zurich, which have also developed through the agreement on the so-called Doppelprofessuren ('dual professorships') signed in 2010 [https://rechtssammlung.sp.ethz.ch/Dokumente/807.1.pdf]. With Prof. Alimonti's appointment, the number of USI-ETH dual professorships and relevant subject areas rises to five - economics, computational science, chemistry/physics, immunology, and now oncology - thus strengthening the collaboration focus in the field of biomedical sciences".
"Andrea Alimonti is a very innovative researcher, who has opened new perspectives both for the understanding of tumor biology and for the practical application of this new knowledge to the improvement of therapeutic results, especially in prostate cancer," said Prof. Dr. Franco Cavalli, President of the IOR Foundation. "His group, along with those of three other researchers, has now made the IOR a centre of excellence at international level in prostate cancer research".
The official press release of the ETH Board is available at: www.ethrat.ch/en/media/releases/appointments-december19
