Project Description

Biography:

Lidia Trombello is a PhD candidate at Fundació de Recerca Clinic Barcelona – Institut d’Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer (IDIBAPS) in Barcelona, funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship. Originally from Sicily (Italy), she holds a BSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Catania and an MD in Medicine and Surgery from the University of Pisa, which she attended in parallel with the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, a research university offering interdisciplinary, excellence-based training. During her studies, she participated in the MEET (Medicine Enhanced by Engineering and Technology) program, combining medicine, biomedical engineering, and digital health, which sparked her interest in how innovation can transform clinical practice and improve patient care.

Her passion for oncology developed through international research experiences, all supported by highly competitive scholarships with acceptance rates below 5%. She carried out her first laboratory internship at EPFL in Lausanne in the lab of Prof. Cathrin Brisken, focusing on hormone receptor signaling in breast cancer. She later joined Prof. Martin Bornhäuser’s lab at the Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus in Dresden, studying immune–tumor interactions in leukemia, and worked at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in the group of Prof. Anna Dubrovska, investigating immunomodulatory mechanisms in head and neck cancer.

During her PhD, Lidia focuses on developing ctDNA-based biomarkers for metastatic HER2-positive and triple-negative breast cancer. Through ADAPTMET, she aims to contribute to translational metastasis research within a collaborative international network. Driven by scientific curiosity, methodological rigor, and a translational vision, she seeks to bridge basic research and clinical practice to advance meaningful improvements in oncology.