Feb. 20 – In Emilia, there is an example of how made in Italy can be an expression of growth, success and innovation: Giuseppe Giorgini, founder of Silicon Biosystems, was received yesterday at the Quirinale by the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, and was awarded the Leonardo Award for Start-ups. Silicon Biosystems is a company behind the brilliant idea put forth by Gianni Medoro in his doctoral thesis. A young graduate in electrical engineering and researcher in Bologna, Medoro focused on cancer diagnosis and electrophoresis, a technique that greatly reduces the invasiveness of clinical trials in patients. The company developed a system that allows isolating, manipulating and retrieving the cancer cells in the blood, without any invasive procedures and allowing the oncologist to formulate more effective treatments with fewer side effects. “What we do – says Giorgini – is recover from the blood the circulating tumor cells. This is even more important for solid tumors where there are few circulating tumor cells. And we are able to select and isolate those few cells, and we are also able to identify and sequence their DNA, so that we can provide information on the mutations present in these cells, making it easier to find the most suitable drug.”
