Chiara Bonini, MD is Professor of Hematology at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, School of Medicine, Milan, and Deputy Director of the Research Division of Immunology, Transplantation and Infectious Diseases at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute. She is a physician scientist, trained in Hemato-oncology and Immunology in Milan, and at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The main research focus of her lab is the development of cell and gene therapy approaches to treat cancer. She pioneered the clinical application of suicide gene therapy applied to allogeneic stem cell transplantation and more recently developed innovative approaches to redirect T cell specificity against cancer with genetic manipulation and genome editing. A large part of her research is devoted to the identification of T cell subsets with the highest expansion and persistence abilities, to be exploited for cancer immunotherapy.
She received several awards during her career: The Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Cell and Gene Therapy (2005); the Team Science Recognition Award from the iSBTC (2010); the Van Rood Award from the European Federation of Immunogenetics (2012); the Jon Van Rood Award (2012), the Basic Science Award (2014) and the Van Bekkum Award (2012 and 2016) from the European Society of Bone Marrow Transplantation. She has been in the Board of Directors of several European and American cell and gene therapy scientific societies (ESGCT 2005-2011; ASGCT 2011-2014) and Chair of the Cell Therapy and Immunobiology Working Party (CTIWP) of the European Bone Marrow Transplantation Society (2014-2018). She is currently Member of ASH Awards Committee.
Since 2001, the lab has been funded from the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR and FIRB-ideas 2008, associated to ERC starting grant program), Telethon, the Italian Ministry of Health, The European Union (FP-IV, FP-V, FP-VI, FP-VII, H2020), the Italian Association for Cancer Research (AIRC), Fondazione Cariplo. In 2019 she received funding as a PI of an AIRC 5x1000 Program (7 years).