• Biography 

After a Master degree in 2019 at the University of Perugia (Italy), Sofia attended the “Laboratory of Chromatin and gene regulation during development” at the Imagine Institute of Genetic Diseases in Paris, for an internship/Erasmus project of 6 months.

During this period, she started to study Sickle Cell Disease and the new therapeutic approaches for this disease, such as the use of lentiviral vectors and the Crispr / Cas9 technology.

During her internship, she works on the individuation of the insertion points of a lentiviral vector encoding the β-globin gene in the genome of hematopoietic stem cells from sickle cell patients, using and optimizing a particular type of PCR.

After her internship, in January 2020 she participated to the recruitment for the EVIDENCE-International Training Network Marie-Curie project, a network project between different laboratories in Europe, all focusing on the study of the properties and behavior of red blood cells according to the extracellular environment, or in case of specific disease. She started a PhD in March 2020 between the Interuniversity Laboratory of Motricity Biology (Lyon 1) and the Erytech Pharma company where she works on: 1) the rheological characterization of sickle red blood cells and the analysis of eryptosis markers according to the severity of the disease, and 2) the rheological and cellular impact of an encapsulation process of therapeutic molecules into mouse red blood cells.

Sofia Esperti (sofia.esperti @ erytech.com)

Nationality: French

Institution

Université Claude Bernard (Lyon 1)

Team: [VBRBC]

Position: PhD Student