Panetti, Dr Silvia

Academic background

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.

Recent Publications

Steffke EE, Latifi L, Hana T, Hara A, Coombs M, Spurgeon J, McAuliffe J, Pereira-Almeida V, Wicki A, Abdel Malak S, Noblecourt L, Wilkinson CH, Hancock J, Panetti S, Kim H, Anderson B, Makranz C, Briceno N, Zhang M, Zhang W, Davis D, Song H, Bryan M, Okada H, Gilbert M, Leung CSK, Van den Eynde BJ, Terabe M. Systemic viral vector vaccination induces brain resident memory T cells to drive anti-glioblastoma immunity. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2026 Jun 19:2026.06.18.733241. doi: 10.64898/2026.06.18.733241. PMID: 42367998; PMCID: PMC13307938.

Jackson MT, Zhao T, Milotay G, Pedroza-Pacheco I, Cai Y, Willis C, Phyu SM, Beernaert B, Kwon JT, Estephan H, Almeida VP, Aggelakopoulou M, Panetti S, Zierhut C, Elliott T, Adamopoulou E, Rehwinkel J, Sim MJ, Grover A, Gabrilovich DI, Fairfax BP, Honoré E, Withers DR, Christianson JC, Parkes EE. TMEM33 deletion potentiates anti-tumor CD8+ T cell immunity. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2026 Jan 2:2026.01.01.697288. doi: 10.64898/2026.01.01.697288. PMID: 41509280; PMCID: PMC12776282.

*McAuliffe J, *Panetti S, Steffke E, Wicki A, Pereira-Almeida V, Noblecourt L, Hu Y, Guo SYW, Lesenfants J, Ramirez-Valdez RA, Chandrasekar V, Ahmad M, Stroobant V, Vigneron N, Van den Eynde BJ, Leung CSK. Novel H-2D^b-restricted CD8 epitope derived from mouse MAGE-type antigen P1A mediates antitumor immunity in C57BL/6 mice. J Immunother Cancer. 2024 Oct 8;12(10):e008998. doi: 10.1136/jitc-2024-008998. PMID: 39384196; PMCID: PMC11474967.

Panetti S, McJannett N, Fultang L, Booth S, Gneo L, Scarpa U, Smith C, Vardon A, Vettore L, Whalley C, Pan Y, Várnai C, Endou H, Barlow J, Tennant D, Beggs A, Mussai F, De Santo C. Engineering amino acid uptake or catabolism promotes CART-cell adaption to the tumor environment. Blood Adv. 2023 May 9;7(9):1754-1761. doi: 10.1182/bloodadvances.2022008272. PMID: 36521029; PMCID: PMC10182289.

Stavrou V, Fultang L, Booth S, De Simone D, Bartnik A, Scarpa U, Gneo L, Panetti S, Potluri S, Almowaled M, Barlow J, Jankevics A, Lloyd G, Southam A, Priestman DA, Cheng P, Dunn W, Platt F, Endou H, Craddock C, Keeshan K, Mussai F, De Santo C. Invariant NKT cells metabolically adapt to the acute myeloid leukaemia environment. Cancer Immunol Immunother. 2023 Mar;72(3):543-560. doi:10.1007/s00262-022-03268-4. Epub 2022 Aug 13. PMID: 35962843; PMCID: PMC9947083.

Fultang L, Booth S, Yogev O, Martins da Costa B, Tubb V, Panetti S, Stavrou V, Scarpa U, Jankevics A, Lloyd G, Southam A, Lee SP, Dunn WB, Chesler L, Mussai F, De Santo C. Metabolic engineering against the arginine microenvironment enhances CAR-T cell proliferation and therapeutic activity. Blood. 2020 Sep 3;136(10):1155-1160. doi: 10.1182/blood.2019004500. PMID: 32573723; PMCID: PMC7565134.

*Fultang L, *Panetti S, Ng M, Collins P, Graef S, Rizkalla N, Booth S, Lenton R, Noyvert B, Shannon-Lowe C, Middleton G, Mussai F, De Santo C. MDSC targeting with Gemtuzumab ozogamicin restores T cell immunity and immunotherapy against cancers. EBioMedicine. 2019 Sep;47:235-246. doi: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2019.08.025.Epub 2019 Aug 25. PMID: 31462392; PMCID: PMC6796554.

Jones N, Vincent EE, Cronin JG, Panetti S, Chambers M, Holm SR, Owens SE, Francis NJ, Finlay DK, Thornton CA. Akt and STAT5 mediate naïve human CD4+ T-cell early metabolic response to TCR stimulation. Nat Commun. 2019 May 3;10(1):2042. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-10023-4. PMID: 31053703; PMCID: PMC6499791.

Jones N, Cronin JG, Dolton G, Panetti S, Schauenburg AJ, Galloway SAE, Sewell AK, Cole DK, Thornton CA, Francis NJ. Metabolic Adaptation of Human CD4+ and CD8+ T-Cells to T-Cell Receptor-Mediated Stimulation. Front Immunol. 2017 Nov 9;8:1516. doi: 10.3389/fimmu.2017.01516. PMID: 29170670; PMCID: PMC5684100.