Michele De Palma

Michele (Miki) De Palma is a tenured associate professor in the School of Life Sciences at EPFL, where he teaches cancer biology. He has served as executive director and chair of the scientific committee of the AGORA Cancer Research Center over the past four years. Miki trained as a postdoctoral researcher and later became group leader at the Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan, where he developed gene transfer strategies to engineer monocytes into anti-tumoral immune cells – work that led to a first-in-kind clinical trial in brain cancer (ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03866109). Since joining EPFL in 2012, he has received two ERC programme grants and, in 2017, the Robert Wenner Prize for cancer research. In 2023, he was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science-Clarivate. Research in the De Palma lab focuses on tumor resistance to immunotherapy mediated by myeloid cells and the angiogenic vasculature, and on developing novel platforms of engineered dendritic cell therapies. In his spare time, Miki studies the taxonomy of Scarab beetles in the family Cetoniinae.