Eduardo Bonavita, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cancer Inflammation and Immunity group led by Santiago Zelenay, has won the Acteria Prize for the best PhD thesis in Immunology in Europe.

Acteria Prizes are awarded by the European Federation of Immunological Societies, with the aim of singling out Europe’s young talents in immunology. Eduardo, who completed his PhD in Italy, was nominated by the Italian Society of Immunology, Clinical Immunology and Allergology (SIICA) for his outstanding work.

Eduardo joined the Institute in 2016 from the renowned laboratory of Professor Alberto Mantovani where he carried out his ground breaking doctoral research. His findings that the deficiency of long pentraxin 3 (PTX3) was associated with higher tumour burden, increased proinflammatory cytokine production, increased complement deposition and higher gene instability, as well as being epigenetically regulated in selected mesenchymal and epithelial cancers, critically demonstrated that PTX3, a regulatory molecule of the humoral arm of innate immunity, acts as an extrinsic oncosuppressor gene in mouse and humans and led to a key first-author publication in Cell. Further work characterising a new molecular mechanism regulating NK cell biology in cancer resulted in another high impact publication in Nature.

Soon after Eduardo arrived at the Institute, he was awarded a highly competitive European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) Long-Term Fellowship and continues to make important discoveries and author publications.

The prize includes an honorarium and 150,000 euros for his lab. Eduardo has been invited to give a specially organised Plenary Lecture at the European Congress of Immunology (to be held in September 2018 in Amsterdam) where he will receive the prize. And because Eduardo wanted to go to that conference anyway, he sent an abstract which happily was selected for oral presentation, so he will be giving two talks.