Rome, Latium, Italy
Paolo Di Giorgio is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Angelini Ventures. He is currently a board member of Argobio and Extend, an observer board member of Pretzel Therapeutics, GenEp, and Archlight Therapeutics, and a member of the investment committee of the Angelini Lumira Bioscience Fund. Paolo is a life sciences executive with over 20 years of experience in venture capital, R&D, external innovation, and business development. Since 2016, he was the Head of R&D at Angelini Pharma, where he led their pre-clinical development group with multiple programs in the areas of CNS and anti-infectives. In 2019 he created and led the external innovation and corporate venturing units (Angelini Pharma Ventures) of Angelini Pharma. Prior to Angelini Pharma, Paolo was leading drug discovery programs in the areas of neuropsychiatric and neurodegeneration at Novartis Pharma in Switzerland. His team was one of the first to use stem cell-derived neurons for drug screening, biomarker identification and to elucidate novel disease mechanisms (Pecho-Vrieseling E. et al, Nat Neurosci. 2014). He also contributed to define the BD&L neuroscience strategy for pain indications. Paolo graduated from the University of Bologna in 2001. His first research experience was at EMBL in Heidelberg, where he studied the biology of the plasmodium malariae. In 2002, started working at the Merck Research Laboratories Institute in Rome (IRBM) where he dissected epigenetic mechanisms behind neoplastic formation in leukemia. During this period, he enrolled in a PhD program with the University of Perugia and Harvard University (as a visitor student). During his 4 years at Harvard, Paolo pioneered novel methods to study neurodegenerative diseases using embryonic stem cell-derived neurons (Di Giorgio et al. Nature Neuroscience, 2007; Di Giorgio et al. Cell Stem Cells, 2008). In 2008 he joined Fred ‘Rusty’ Gage’s lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, to continue his research on neurodegenerative disorders. Paolo also holds an MBA degree from IE Business School in Madrid, Spain.
GenEp, Inc. is a privately held pre-clinical stage biotechnology company based on intellectual property assets licensed from the University of Virginia. GenEp aims to create therapies targeting mutations of sodium and other ion channels that cause rare genetic epilepsies and other treatment-resistant epilepsies.