Massimiliano Pagani earned his degree in Biology at University of Milan and his PhD in the lab of prof. R. Sitia at the San Raffaele Research Center in Milan.
He then moved in the R&D department of a Biotech company, PRIMM (Milan, Italy) where he was involved in several scientific collaborations within EU sponsored projects and he combined his R&D work with managerial activities with growing responsibilities from Staff scientist to Head of R&D.
He is currently responsible for the Integrative Biology Program at INGM where he started his own group in 2008 focusing on the molecular mechanisms underlying T lymphocyte differentiation and plasticity. His work in these years contributed to identify and characterize regulatory non-coding RNAs that have been proven to be important for human CD4+ T cell differentiation. His current research interests expanded to the molecular characterization of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes by epigenomic and transcriptomic analyses and to state-of-the-art single-cell technologies to fully address the heterogeneity and functional complexity of lymphocytes subsets in both health and disease.
In December 2013 he has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council to investigate the role of long non-coding RNAs of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes as novel anti-cancer therapeutic targets. Starting from January 2015 he has been appointed as Professor of Molecular Biology in the Department of Medical Biotechnology and Translational Medicine Università degli Studi di Milano.