Sofia Esperti

How to get to know this grant

After my Master's degree in Italy, l had the opportunity to attend an Erasmus Traineeship Project at "Imagine Institute of Genetic Disease" in Paris (FR). During this great experience I started to discover "the red blood cell's world", because l worked in a research team focusing on gene therapy for Sickle cell disease.

This Traineeship changed my life because after that l decided to continue working in the red blood cell field, that is how l have found the EVIDENCE project.

Reason for joining

I was interested to keep on the research about Sickle cell Disease and that is why l started to look for a PhD position in Europe. In fact, my Evidence Project at LIBM is about the rheological characterization of sickle red blood cells and the analysis of senescence markers according to the severity of the disease.

Expectations

l work at Erytech Pharma, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company which uses a technology to encapsulate therapeutic drug substances inside red blood cells to develop innovative therapies for rare forms of cancer and orphan diseases. The objective of my work is to characterize  the impact of the encapsulation process on the biology of red blood cells.

It is really challenging to work between an Academic and a Private Company laboratory, it provides scientific exchanges, and it improves professional skills.

I'm glad to be part of this European project and l think that together, each one with different skills, we are building a very strong team on red blood cells knowledges.

Updates

I am the ESR n. 15 and I work between two different laboratories for the Innovative Training Network (ITN), the Erytech company and the Vascular Biology RBC team from the University of Lyon1. It has been almost two years since I started my PhD in the Evidence project.

I mostly work using flow cytometry and ektacytometry techniques to analyze RBC properties. For the project with the VBRBC, I'm working on the characterization of sickle red blood cells, I analyze the expression of senescence markers according to the severity of the disease. In particular, I am working on the analysis of the properties of sickle red blood cells abnormally retaining mitochondria. Few studies have been done about it; the aim is to improve our knowledge about senescence markers according to clinical manifestations.

At Erytech Pharma, I work on the characterization of RBC after the encapsulation of therapeutic molecules, to see if the process has an impact on the biology of RBCs.

The possibility to work both in an academic and non-academic field is really stimulating and it is giving to me different skills. It is not simple, but it's allowing me to understand two different science worlds, based on the confidentiality or on the "open-to-all" principles.

I regularly participate to many scientific meetings, internal ones, or meetings with different hosts from other European laboratories to present our results, to exchange and to look for collaborations and advice.

I started my thesis project at the same time of the pandemic of Covid19 as lots of my ESRs colleagues, it created lots of troubles to make a connection with them and with all the other colleagues from the two laboratories. It has been difficult to start my experiments too.

Hopefully, I had the possibility to work for a month with two of my ESRs colleagues for a secondment at the CNRS of Roscoff in France, under the supervision of Stéphane Egée and it was the best experience of my thesis project since the beginning. The exchange and the collaboration we had during this period was very productive, we collected interesting data and we are organizing another secondment to continue our experiments on the same subject. I think that the collaboration between ESRs with different scientific skills is really important especially in this kind of project, it allows to create professional and personal connections which could be useful also for future projects.

To handle two different projects at the same time is very challenging, but I feel that I have already learned a lot, at theoretical and practical level.

To live in a foreign country is a great life experience also, you can learn another language and habits and you can develop your personality. Beyond the work on the lab, this kind of project allow you to combine work and travel, so it is great.