Silvia is a lab-based immunologist who studies how tumours disable the immune responses meant to destroy them, and how that process might be reversed. Across her career, this question has taken different forms: how tumours starve immune cells of the nutrients they need, how vaccines can be leveraged to reawaken antigen-specific immunity, and, most recently, how tumours actively reprogramme immune cells into allies rather than attackers.

During her PhD in Immunology and Immunotherapy at the University of Birmingham (De Santo Lab), she investigated amino acid depletion as a mechanism of immunosuppression within the tumour microenvironment, and explored strategies to counter this nutrient starvation in personalised immunotherapies such as CAR-T cells, improving their persistence and efficacy.

During her postdoctoral research at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, University of Oxford (Van den Eynde Lab), she turned to next-generation cancer vaccines, investigating how vaccines targeting antigens shared across tumour types could be deployed at scale to boost anti-tumour immunity in a wide range of cancer patients.

She is now funded by Worldwide Cancer Research (Parkes Lab) to study how chromosomally unstable tumours shape the immune cells around them, turning potential attackers into protectors of the tumour itself, with the aim of identifying vulnerabilities in this process that could be targeted therapeutically to break the cycle.

Silvia is particularly drawn to two open questions in the field: how to reconcile the drive for ever more personalised cancer treatments with the need for therapies that are scalable and sustainable within a public health system such as the NHS? And how sex differences in immunity shape cancer treatment response, an area she believes deserves far more research, so that the therapeutic needs of both men and women are properly understood, and personalised medicine lives up to its name for everyone.