Assistant Professor of General Pathology at the Dipartimento di Scienze Oncologiche e Chirurgiche, Università di Padova Medical School.

Research interests
The laboratory focuses on tumor immunology and the analysis of interactions between the immune system and neoplasia, and on the development of new anti-tumor immunotherapy approaches in pre-clinical experimental models. The main research interests are the optimisation of DNA vaccines for neoplasia and viral diseases, and the identification of prognostic immunologic parameters that allow the validation of current protocols of immunotherapy to be applied in the clinical setting.
The future aims of the laboratory are to develop a polyepitope DNA vaccine for clinical use. This vector will contain several antigenic epitopes derived from human tumor antigens, and will be tested in a translational model represented by transgenic mice expressing the A2.01 MHC class I molecule.

Selected publications
Dubey P, Su H, Adonai N, Du S, Rosato A, Braun J, Gambhir SS, Witte ON. Quantitative imaging of the T cell antitumor response by positron-emission tomography. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2003;100:1232-7.

Rosato A, Dalla Santa S, Zoso A, Giacomelli S, Milan G, Macino B, Tosello V, Della Bona P, Lollini P-L, De Giovanni C, Zanovello P. The cytotoxic T-lymphocyte response Against a poorly immunogenic mammary adenocarcinoma is focused on a single immunodominant class I epitope derived from the gp70 env product of an endogenous retrovirus. Cancer Res 2003;63:2158-63.

Stievano L, Tosello V, Marcato N, Rosato A, Sebelin A, Chieco-Bianchi L, Amadori A. CD8(+)alphabeta(+) T cells that lack surface CD5 antigen expression are a major lymphotactin (XCL1) source in peripheral blood lymphocytes. J Immunol 2003;171:4528-38.

Rosato A, Zoso A, Milan G, Macino B, Dalla Santa S, Tosello V, Di Carlo E, Musiani P, Whalen RG, Zanovello P. Individual analysis of mice vaccinated against a weakly immunogenic self tumor-specific antigen reveals a correlation between CD8 T cell response and antitumor efficacy. J Immunol 2003;171:5172-9.

Silic-Benussi M, Cavallari I, Zorzan T, Rossi E, Hiraragi H, Rosato A, Horie K, Saggioro D, Lairmore MD, Willems L, Chieco-Bianchi L, D'Agostino DM, Ciminale V. Suppression of tumor growth and cell proliferation by p13II, a mitochondrial protein of human T cell leukemia virus type 1. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2004;101:6629-34.