Vincenzo Cerullo

Vincenzo Cerullo (Vince), is professor of Biological Drug Development, Head of Drug Research Program. He is a member and PI at Institute of Life Science Helsinki (HiLIFE), at Translational Immunology Programme (TRIMM), at Cancer Precision Medicine iCAN and GeneCellNano flagships at University of Helsinki. He is also associate professor at University of Naples Federico II at the department of Molecular Medicine and Medical Biotechnology and scientific founder of VALO Therapeutics and GlobeVAC. Vince is also member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Literature and Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He got his PhD at Centre for genetic Engineering (CENIGE) at University of Naples, Federico II in 2004, then he moved to Houston Texas (USA) for a postdoc at Baylor College of Medicine. In 2009 he moved to University of Helsinki where he worked as senior researcher until 2012 when he was awarded the tenure-track professorship and started the ImmunoViroTherapy Lab (IVTLab, www.ivtlab.org). In these years IVTLab has raised more than 8 million Euros for research, including the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant and two ERC proof-of-concept, HiLIFE fellow, Academy of Finland and Jane and Aatos Erkko Foundation grant. The group has produced more than hundreds scientific papers and nineteen patent families and has co-founded two spin-off companies of which one is now running our first in human clinical trial (VALO therapeutics). Vince has been awarded the Outstanding Young Investigator award in 2014 by the European Society of Gene and cell Therapy, the Excellence in Research award by the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy in 2015 and the Outstanding Achievement Award by the Netherland Society of Gene and Cell Therapy in 2025. One of Vince’s passion is science dissemination, this is why has been involved from the beginning in organizing the Science track in Slush, he has pitched himself on the Slush stage in 2015, 2016 and on the Slush Y Science stage in 2017 (www.slush.org). Among other things, he has also presented a TEDx talk on the importance of creativity in science (https://youtu.be/1btbElPnREI) among many other science dissemination initiatives.