Greta Bagnolini graduated in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Technology in March 2016 at the University of Bologna, with a master thesis on the design of multitarget ligands to study Alzheimer’s disease. In 2017, she joined Prof. S.L. Ciurli’s group as research fellow, funded by CIRMMP, and she worked on a chemical biology approach for the study of urease activity. Soon after, she started her PhD studies in Biocomputational, Biotechnological, Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Science at the University of Bologna, in affiliation to the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), as part of Professor A. Cavalli’s group. She received her PhD degree in March 2021. Her scientific interest was the exploitation of synthetic lethality as paradigm to develop effective anticancer treatments against pancreatic cancer. To this aim, she designed small molecules as inhibitors of the RAD51-BRCA2 protein-protein interaction, to be used in combination with PARP inhibitors. The project was funded by the Italian Foundation for Cancer Research (AIRC). During her PhD, she joined Prof. A.K.H. Hirsch’s group at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), division of Drug Design and Optimisation (DDOP). Here she worked on the application of dynamic combinatorial chemistry on RAD51 as hit identification strategy. In September 2021, she joined Dr. A.E. Hargrove’s group at Duke University as postdoctoral research fellow. The group pioonered the field of RNA targeting and recognition using small molecules. Her scientific interest was the development of scaffold-based libraries to target non-coding RNAs involved in pathologies, including viral infections and cancer. In 2022, she was awarded with the HIPS EuroPhD Certificate. Since June 2023, she is a postdoc research fellow in the Bolognesi Medchem Lab. Her current scientific research regards the design of RIBOTACs, small molecules targeting RNA degradation. The project is currently funded by PNRR. She is a current member of the communication team of the Pharmaceutical Chemistry Division (DCF) of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI).
