Melania Lazzari started her education at the University of Pavia, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Molecular Biotechnology in September 2019. She then pursued a master’s program in Medical Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Milan. In February 2022, she defended her master’s thesis, which focused on the study of the rare disease Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). She continued to work on the role of the tumor microenvironment in LAM pathogenesis as a postgraduate research fellow until September 2022 at San Paolo Hospital in Milan.

In November 2022, she began her PhD in Molecular and Experimental Medicine at Humanitas University. She spent the first 18 months of her PhD at the Department of Biomedicine (DBM) in Basel, Switzerland, where she gained expertise in working with 3D in vitro models of Patient-Derived Organoids (PDOs). She started her PhD project, focusing on studying the role of KRAS in the development of colorectal cancer (CRC) using PDOs as a proxy for patient response to drug treatment, following drug screening with a self-developed ad hoc platform.

Now back from Basel, she is currently working in Prof. Piscuoglio’s Precision Medicine research laboratory to investigate in depth the molecular landscape in CRC following KRAS-targeting perturbation.