Chiara Sandro
Chiara Sandro obtained her Master’s degree in Health Biology from the University of Padua. After a research internship in Belgium, at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, focusing on clinical trials for glioblastoma, she returned to Italy to continue working on this very aggressive brain tumour, characterised by an average survival of only 12-15 months.
She is currently a research assistant at the Fondazione Pisana per la Scienza for the clinical trial ‘Oxidative phosphorylation targeting in malignant glioma using metformin plus radiotherapy temozolomide’ (OPTIMUM, ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT04945148). This is a multi-centre, international phase II clinical trial designed to evaluate the efficacy of the antimitochondrial activity of metformin in addition to conventional first-line radiochemotherapy in patients with de novo wild-type IDH mitochondrial hyperactivation (OXPHOS) glioblastoma (GBM). The trial, which started on 10 May 2024, is sponsored by the Hopital Foch, Suresnes, France, and coordinated by Dr Anna Luisa Di Stefano (Hopital Foch, Suresnes, France/UOC Neurosurgery Hospital of Livorno, Azienda USL Toscana Nord-ovest). The clinical trial will prospectively select patients with wild-type de novo IDH GBM using a molecular analysis technique with RNA sequencing of FFPE tissues capable of identifying the mitochondrial OXPHOS signature. It is planned to screen 640 cases of patients with wild-type de novo GBM IDH in a total of 7 centres (H. Foch-Suresnes, Pitié-Salpêtrière-Paris, Saint Louis-Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Milan Besta, Livorno).
Chiara is in charge of the reception, registration, processing of tumour tissue samples and RNA-sequencing, within the Genomics and Transcriptomics section of Dr. Chiara Maria Mazzanti, working in collaboration with the Bioinformatics section (Head: Paolo Aretini).
She is also actively involved in the Genomics and Transcriptomics group’s translational research projects in glioblastoma and osteosarcoma, in particular nucleic acid extraction from various sample types (tumour tissue, blood, cells, FFPE and saliva samples), transcriptome and exome construction, sequencing and cell culture, data analysis, project and grant writing.
