Elisa Oricchio

Elisa Oricchio (born 1979) is an Italian cancer researcher and associate professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She discovered that EphA7 activates the tumor suppressor gene for patients with follicular lymphoma and was awarded the Lorini Foundation Award and Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists for her discovery.

Biography Elisa Oricchio was born in 1979 and grew up in Cilento, Italy. She earned a bachelor's degree and went on to attain a master's degree in biology from Sapienza University of Rome. In 2008, she earned her PhD in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Oricchio moved to the United States almost immediately to begin her post-doctorate research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In her research, she identified in 2011 that tumor cells treated with pure EphA7, an anti-tumor protein, died, which was a significant discovery in a rarely researched field. Her discovery was awarded with a grant from Sloan Kettering and a Fellowship from the Lymphoma Research Foundation and the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists in New York City, the same year. Oricchio's work has repeatedly been funded. She was awarded a second Fellowship from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society which was successful in developing a mouse model. In 2014, she was hired by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology as a researcher and to support creation of the new Swiss Cancer Center in Lausanne at the Lausanne University Hospital.

Accolades

Selected publications