Phd in PHARMACEUTICAL SCIENCES

email: francesca.ghirga@uniroma1.it
phone: 0649693215
building: CU032

Dr. Francesca Ghirga received the master degree in Medicinal Chemistry in 2010 at Sapienza University of Rome and obtained the PhD degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences (XXVI) in 2014. Her primary research interest is centered in organic chemistry, with a particular focus in the fields of natural products chemistry. From 2014 to February 2020, she is a Post-Doc at Italian Institute of Technology (CLNS@Sapienza). The Post-Doc position at IIT give her the possibility to advance the research experience in organizing an organic chemistry laboratory, in guiding a research team (PhD students and Post-Doc) and leading multidisciplinary projects and research groups. Research performed at the CLNS@Sapienza covers a number of challenging projects ranging from synthetic chemistry to biodistribution studies. A number of projects on natural products drug discovery have been developed, also in collaboration with scientists from CLNS@Sapienza and outside Italy under the framework of COST collaborative network of the H2020 program. Her expertise in organic synthesis allowed the optimization of active Hits up to Lead compounds or, at least, Lead candidates by improving potency, stability, physicochemical features, chemical properties, and metabolic/pharmacokinetics parameters. Among the challenge projects on the identification of bioactive natural products, she was involved in the field of target therapy against cancer and antibiotic resistance and most of the discovered compounds are currently patent protected. In particular, she contributed, as inventor, to the discovery of a natural compound as inhibitor of the HH pathway which has been patented and successfully completed the preclinical phase for the treatment of specific types of brain, pancreatic and skin cancers. Since 2018, she is the task leader of the Joint Lab CLNS (IIT)-CrestOptics Project 2b 2018 – 2021 for the Rational Design of Tau Tangle-Selective Near-Infrared Fluorescent probes. In this regard, combining her expertise in organic synthesis with computational modelling, she rationally designed and synthetized a selective fluorescent marker which is currently patent protected. In 2021, she was awarded and are managing a fellowship “BE-FOR-ERC”, which is part of the “SAPIExcellence” Programme, an initiative fielded by Sapienza University, for the development of a research project in the oncology field as principal investigator. She is the author of 71 publications and co-autor of six family patents.