Alice Giustacchini
- Research Group Leader, Giustacchini Group
Alice obtained her PhD from San Raffaele University under the supervision of Professor Luigi Naldini, with a project focusing on the role of microRNAs in the regulation of haematopoietic stem cell functions. She next moved to the UK to undertake a post-doc in the laboratories of Professor Sten Eirik Jacobsen and Adam Mead at the University of Oxford. During her post-doc she focused on the development of novel single-cell approaches to resolve cell heterogeneity in leukemic stem cells during therapy response. Since 2019, Alice is leading a research group at the University College London (UCL) Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and she has now joined the Human Technopole to set up a research group. Alice’s research revolves around understanding the biological mechanisms that make leukemia unresponsive to conventional therapies and identifying novel therapeutic targets allowing for their selective targeting. By combining single-cell genomics and proteomics with stem cell functional assays, her group aims to develop novel strategies to prevent and treat leukemia progression.
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Publications
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09/2023 - Nature Communications
Perivascular niche cells sense thrombocytopenia and activate hematopoietic stem cells in an IL-1 dependent manner
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) residing in specialized niches in the bone marrow are responsible for the balanced output of multiple short-lived blood cell lineages in steady-state and in response to different challenges. However, feedback mechanisms by which HSCs, through their niches, sense acute losses of specific blood cell lineages remain to be established. While all […]
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04/2023 - blooad advances
Activation priming and cytokine polyfunctionality modulate the enhanced functionality of low-affinity CD19 CAR T cells
We recently described a low-affinity second-generation CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) CAT that showed enhanced expansion, cytotoxicity, and antitumor efficacy compared with the high-affinity (FMC63-based) CAR used in tisagenlecleucel, in preclinical models. Furthermore, CAT demonstrated an excellent toxicity profile, enhanced in vivo expansion, and long-term persistence in a phase 1 clinical study. To understand the […]
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03/2022 - STAR Protocols
High-dimensional functional phenotyping of preclinical human CAR T cells using mass cytometry
Here, we present a comprehensive protocol for the generation and functional characterization of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and their products by mass cytometry in a reproducible and scalable manner. We describe the production of CAR T cells from human peripheral blood mononuclear cells. We then detail a three-step staining protocol with metal-labeled antibodies and the […]
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03/2019 - Molecular Cell
Unravelling Intratumoral Heterogeneity through High-Sensitivity Single-Cell Mutational Analysis and Parallel RNA Sequencing
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) has emerged as a powerful tool for resolving transcriptional heterogeneity. However, its application to studying cancerous tissues is currently hampered by the lack of coverage across key mutation hotspots in the vast majority of cells; this lack of coverage prevents the correlation of genetic and transcriptional readouts from the same single cell. To overcome this, […]
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05/2017 - Nature Medicine
Single-cell transcriptomics uncovers distinct molecular signatures of stem cells in chronic myeloid leukemia
Recent advances in single-cell transcriptomics are ideally placed to unravel intratumoral heterogeneity and selective resistance of cancer stem cell (SC) subpopulations to molecularly targeted cancer therapies. However, current single-cell RNA-sequencing approaches lack the sensitivity required to reliably detect somatic mutations. We developed a method that combines high-sensitivity mutation detection with whole-transcriptome analysis of the same […]
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