Caterina La Porta

CEO, President of the Board, R&D, Digital Health - Ariadne
Professor of General Pathology at the University of Milan

Caterina A. M. La Porta is a professor of general pathology, group leader of the Oncolab Laboratory (www.oncolab.it) at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policies, and a member of the steering committee of the Center for Complexity and Biosystems (www.complexitybiosistems.it), the Innovation For Well-Being And Environment Center, and the Center for Molecular chemio-prevention (CMCP) of chronic degenerative diseases (CDS) at the University of Milan. Since 2022, she has also been the coordinator of the interdisciplinary laboratory "Integrative approach for Global Health".

She has spent many periods abroad collaborating with numerous international universities and research institutions including MIT, Cornell University, Weizmann Institute of Science, Aalto University, and LMU in Germany. In 2017, she was named among the "100 experts", the best female scientists in Italy. She was included in the portrait exhibition of the 100 female scientists created by photographer Gerald Bruneau, which was exhibited not only in Italy but around the world.

Having trained as a general pathologist and cell biologist, she has spent most of her career trying to understand the basic phenomena of biological sciences, initially in neuroscience and later in cancer, using molecular and cellular biology approaches. The main goal of her group is to understand the heterogeneity of cancer, particularly melanoma and breast cancer, one of the most aggressive tumors. In the last twenty years, she has shifted her interests to quantitative biology and digital medicine. She has studied the emerging properties of cancer by developing algorithms capable of quantitatively capturing the dynamics of complex cell regulatory networks (Arianna, Stella).

A natural consequence of her work on cancer heterogeneity with big data was the birth, in June 2018, of the innovative startup COMPLEXDATA, of which she is CEO and chairman of the board ( www.complexdata.it ). Her success story combining science and entrepreneurship was selected by Assolombarda for the "Genius and Enterprise" exhibition in 2019. Complexdata has developed the ARIADNE platform that innovatively utilizes artificial intelligence to predict the aggressiveness of triple-negative breast cancer. With ARIADNE, she has won numerous competitions and ARIADNE was also incubated in the Italian incubator G-Factor in 2019.