Associate Professor

Deparment of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology (CIBIO)

University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Email: alessandro DOT romanel ATSIGN unitn DOT it

I'm leader of the Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics laboratory at CIBIO.

The laboratory focuses on developing innovative approaches to uncover the biological mechanisms driving cancer initiation, evolution, and treatment resistance. We design and integrate bioinformatics methods, computational strategies, and algorithms to analyze next-generation sequencing and high-density array data, complemented by systems biology approaches. We also explore the use of advanced artificial intelligence techniques, to enhance the interpretation of complex biological data. A central goal of our work is to leverage these analyses to identify prognostic and predictive cancer biomarkers. In pursuing these goals, we investigate how inherited and somatic variation in regulatory regions shapes cancer susceptibility and progression, develop innovative approaches for analyzing circulating tumor DNA to capture tumor heterogeneity, and explore allele-specific expression as a key layer of cancer biology. By integrating these complementary lines of research, we aim to uncover novel mechanisms driving tumor development and resistance, and to translate our findings into clinically relevant biomarkers.