Riccardo Cortese
Biomedical Engineering
okairos
Italy
Biography
Riccardo Cortese has a medical degree from the University of Naples. Prof Cortese worked for many years at the LMB of Cambridge UK with the most distinguished group of molecular biologists in the world. Prof. Cortese was a founder and the first director of the Gene Expression Program at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, where he organized a world class laboratory, recruited and coordinated the work of several research groups. Prof. Cortese was the Founder and Scientific Director of IRBM, research institution between Merck, various other pharma companies, and the Italian government.. In particular Prof. Cortese discovered that the integrase of HIV is an excellent target for the development of new drugs and coordinated the effort towards the development of ISENTRESS, presently the most innovative anti-HIV drug. Merck ultimately acquired all the shares of IRBM. Well into his career, Prof.Cortese founded and led Okairos, a Biotech Company dedicated to the development of a new technological platform for the development of genetic vaccines and applied to diseases that afflict the population of the third world countries, such as HCV, Malaria, AIDS, Ebola, etc. More recently, Prof. Cortese founded NOUSCOM, a biotech company dedicated to the development of personalized cancer vaccines, based on individual genomic information and patient specific immunogens.
Research Interest
Genetics, molecular biology and biomedical engineering
