Matteo Iannacone, 2010
Career Development Award Project Title
“Imaging liver immunopathology by intravital microscopy”, 2010
Who he is
Matteo Iannacone is an immunologist whose research focuses on the mechanisms that regulate immune responses within tissues. Since 2010, he has led the “Dynamics of immune responses” laboratory at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, where he is Professor of Pathology and Director of the Division of Immunology, Transplantation and Infectious Diseases.
He returned to Italy after extensive training in the United States – first at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and subsequently at Harvard Medical School in Boston – supported by the Armenise Harvard Career Development Award.
What he does
Iannacone’s research focuses on understanding how immune responses are orchestrated within tissues, and how local microenvironments shape immunity in health and disease. Using the liver as a model system, his work has revealed how a single organ can simultaneously enforce immune tolerance while retaining the capacity to mount effective immune responses against infections and cancer.
To address these questions, his laboratory develops and applies cutting-edge technologies that enable the study of immune responses directly in vivo. These include advanced intravital microscopy to visualize cellular behavior in real time within living tissues, as well as spatially resolved and single-cell omics approaches that capture the molecular states and interactions of immune and non-immune cells at high resolution.
These approaches are integrated with genetic models, functional perturbations, and quantitative imaging to link cellular dynamics with molecular programs across scales—from subcellular processes to whole-organism responses. By combining these complementary strategies, his work aims to define the tissue-specific rules that govern immune surveillance, dysfunction, and therapeutic responsiveness.
This research has direct implications for a broad range of diseases, including chronic viral infections, liver cancer and metastasis, autoimmune and inflammatory disorders, and systemic conditions in which tissue-specific immune regulation plays a critical role. Ultimately, these insights aim to inform the development of more precise, tissue-targeted immunotherapies.
News from the lab
For the first time ever, intravital microscopy has allowed Iannacone’s team to reveal how immune cells track down and eliminate the hepatitis B virus (HBV) in the host liver. The findings, published in the April 2015 issue of Cell, have important therapeutic implications.
