The Program for Advanced Cellular Therapy is excited to announce the hire of Andrea Pennati as Associate Director of Research and Development. In this role, Dr. Pennati will enable transition of UW-borne pre-clinical cell therapy innovations to GMP-compliant workflows. The expressed goal of which is to allow for first-in-human clinical trials of UW therapeutic innovations at UW Health and SMPH.
Dr. Pennati has been with the University of Wisconsin – Madison since September 2016, when he transferred from Emory University with PACT Director Jacques Galipeau, MD, FRCP. Before coming to Madison, he worked in Dr. Galipeau’s laboratory for five years.
Dr. Pennati completed a M.Sc. in Molecular Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular Cell Biology at the University of Milan, Italy. Before joining the Galipeau lab, Andrea worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Giovanni Gadda at Georgia State University, in Atlanta, Georgia, in mechanistic enzymology of flavin-dependent enzymes.
His work in Dr. Galipeau’s lab has included investigating the role of novel engineered fusion cytokines as part of cancer vaccine and cellular immunotherapy strategies. Current studies are aimed at defining the possibility to generate/use regulatory B cells for the treatment of different neurodegenerative diseases as MS, ALS and Alzheimer’s disease.
With more than a decade of laboratory experience, Dr. Pennati leads translating cell-based research projects into clinical investigations by developing, standardized and establishing cellular processing protocols for use in cellular therapies.