Dr. Romano is a physician-scientist, expert in onco-immunology with a specific focus on melanoma and breast cancer. She completed her medical and oncology studies at the University La Sapienza and the National Cancer Institute of Rome - Italy, and subsequently joined the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York for a postdoctoral training in tumor immunology under the supervision of Drs JW Young, P Chapman and JD Wolchok.

From 2011 to 2015, Dr. Romano worked as attending physician at the Service of Oncology, University Hospital of Lausanne and as group leader of the Laboratory of Tumor Immunobiology at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, where she demonstrated the Treg depleting activity of the anti-CTLA-4 – ipilimumab – in melanoma patients.

Since October 2015, she serves as the Medical Director of the Center for Cancer Immunotherapy at the Institut Curie in Paris to foster the development of novel immunotherapies to fight cancer. She has carried out several, pharma-sponsored, early-phase clinical trials and has developed numerous academic clinical trials testing novel immunotherapeutic modalities in melanoma, cervical and breast cancer.

Her Laboratory of Tumor Immunobiology focuses on the direct interrogation of the human tumor-associated myeloid compartment in breast and ovarian cancer by multiple biological and bioinformatics means, with the goal to elucidate immune-protective and -escape mechanisms, and to identify targets associated to resistance to immunotherapy that could inform the design of new treatment modalities. Recently, her Lab has identified a subset of myeloid cells involved in resistance to PD-1 blockade in triple-negative breast cancer.

She has supervised numerous medical oncology fellows as well as immunology research fellows (PhD students and postDocs). Dr Romano has authored and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed articles.

At ESMO, she is currently serving as Deputy Chair of the ESMO Guidelines Committee, as Faculty Member of the Tumour Immunology and Immunotherapy group and as member of the Scientific Committee ESMO Immuno-oncology. Dr Romano is also the leading investigator of the ESMO COVID-19 and Cancer Registry (ESMO-CoCARE), an international collaborative registry-based, cohort study, gathering real-world data on over 1500 cancer patients from Europe, Asia/Oceania and Africa infected with the SARS-CoV2. This registry has the goal to extend and build upon previous observations and support clinicians and regulatory bodies for the management of COVID-19 in cancer patients.