Paola Allavena is group leader at Humanitas Research Hospital, where she leads the Cellular Immunology Lab.

Allavena graduated at the Medical School of the University of Milan and received a PhD in Immunology and Allergology from the same university in 1984. She was a post-doc fellow at the National Cancer Institute of the NIH, in Bethesda, USA, from 1981 to 1984, and then a research associate at the Immunology Lab headed by Prof. Alberto Mantovani, at the “Mario Negri” Research Institute in Milan, where in 1987 she became Head of the Cellular Immunology Lab.

Since 2005 she is at Humanitas Research Hospital, investigating in the field of cancer research, tumor immunology, inflammation and chemokines. Her group actively contributed to understand the links between chronic inflammation and tumor progression, by studying in particular the expression of inflammatory mediators in the tumor microenvironment. A special focus of her scientific research is the role of Tumor-Associated Macrophages and strategies to target them in therapeutic settings.

As of December 2022, Allavena has authored more than 300 scientific publications and has been cited more than 50.000 times. Her h-index, according to Scopus, is 93.