Dr. Alessandro Vindigni joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Oncology as a Professor in August, 2019.
Dr. Vindigni received a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from the University of Padua (Italy) and completed his postdoctoral training at Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis. In 2002, he was appointed Group Leader in Genome Stability at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in Trieste, Italy. In 2011, he relocated his lab to the Saint Louis University School of Medicine, where he was promoted to Full Professor with Tenure and nominated Director of the Graduate Program in Biochemistry of Saint Louis University in 2014. Since 2015, he has been serving as Co-Leader of the DNA Metabolism and Repair (DMR) program of the Siteman Cancer Center at Washington University School of Medicine. The DMR program provides a unique platform for scientists who work in the closely related areas of DNA damage response, DNA replication and repair, chromatin biology, and gene regulation. In 2019, he accepted a position as Professor of Medicine, Pathology and Immunology at Washington University School of Medicine. His laboratory focuses on DNA replication and repair, and the roles of these pathways on cancer initiation, progression and response to chemotherapy and immunotherapy. He combines electron microscopy approaches with genome-wide single-molecule DNA replication assays to study changes in replication fork dynamics upon chemotherapeutic treatment. Combining these technologies, he identified new pathways by which replication responds to cancer chemotherapeutics and provided key insights on how to target these pathways to increase chemotherapeutic sensitivity. His findings have been highlighted in over 80 peer-reviewed articles published in top scientific journals and led to ongoing collaborations with several groups working at the forefront of the DNA replication, repair and cancer fields.