Alberto Mantovani is an Italian physician and immunologist. He is Scientific Director of Istituto Clinico Humanitas, President and Founder of the Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca, and Professor of Pathology at the State University of Milan. He is known for his works in the roles of the immune system in the development of cancer. His research on tumor-associated macrophages established inflammation as one of the causes of cancer. He was the first to identify monocyte chemotactic protein - 1 / CCL2 in 1983, and PTX3 in 1997. His works revealed the existence of decoy receptors in cell-signalling. He has been the most cited scientist in Italy, and one of the ten most cited immunologists worldwide.
Biography
Mantovani was born in Milan on 29 October 1948. He studied medicine at the University of Milan and graduated in 1973. In 1976 he earned a specialization in oncology at the University of Pavia. Between 1973 and 1976, he worked as a visiting fellow at the Department of Tumor Immunology of the Chester Beatty Research Institute in Belmont, Sutton, England, where he continued the studies of Iwan Robert Evans and Peter Alexander. Between 1978 and 1979 he was a visiting fellow at the Laboratory of Immunodiagnosis at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1979 he was appointed Senior investigator in the Department of Tumor Immunology and Chemotherapy at the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri" in Milan. He became the Chief of Laboratory of the institute in 1981. In 1987 he worked at the Laboratory of Molecular Immunoregulation of NIH in Frederick, Maryland, as an Eleanor Roosvelt UICC Scholar. In 1994 he was promoted to Full Professor of General Pathology in the School of Medicine at the University of Brescia. He became Head of the Department of Immunology and Cell Biology at Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri" in 1996. Between 2001 and 2014, he also served as Full Professor of General Pathology in the School of Medicine of the State University of Milan. Then he continued as Full Professor of General Pathology at Humanitas University in 2014. In 2005 he became the Scientific Director of Istituto Clinico Humanitas and President of Fondazione Humanitas per la Ricerca.
Research activities
Following the deepening of the studies by Robert Evans and Peter Alexander on the role of macrophages in tumour formation, Mantovani discovered that macrophages, rather than helping to shrink the tumor, help it to grow and progress. He gave the acronym for such tumor-associated macrophages as TAM. His work in 2013 showed that targeting TAM is useful for cancer treatment. In 1983, his research team has discovered a protein, known as monocyte chemotactic protein - 1 / CCL2, which is part of the large superfamily of chemokines, which belong to the family of cytokines. His works help to establish the concept of "decoy receptors". From the study of the regulation of the cytokines, Mantovani was able to identify the operating principle of the decoy receptor for interleukin - 1. In 1993, his team showed interleukin-1 type II receptor acts as a decoy in the activity of interleukin 1. His team identified the first member of the long pentraxins, named PTX3 in 1997. The discovery was published in a series of papers. His team demonstrated in 2005 that the chemokine receptor D6 acts as a decoy and scavenger receptor for inflammatory chemokines. In 2015 his research, published in the journal Cell, showed that PTX3 gene is capable of curbing cancer by controlling inflammation.
