Stefano Cacciatore
Dr Stefano Cacciatore (ORCID | Scopus Author ID | Google Scholar ID)
Associate Editor for Immunology
Cancer Genomic Group
International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) | Cape Town, South Africa
Stefano Cacciatore obtained his International Ph.D. in Structural Biology from the University of Florence in 2012. He then carried out postdoctoral research at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in the United States and at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom. In 2018, he joined the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in Cape Town, South Africa, and since 2021, he has been leading the Bioinformatics Unit at ICGEB.
Dr. Cacciatore’s research focuses on the development of bioinformatics tools and statistical approaches to support the interpretation of data generated from high-throughput platforms, including metabolomics and genomics. His work centers on creating exploratory data mining methods designed to uncover hidden patterns in complex, high-dimensional datasets. He is the developer of KODAMA, a versatile unsupervised learning algorithm for feature extraction in noisy multi-omics data, which has been successfully applied to identify previously unrecognized metabolic phenotypes associated with poor survival outcomes in cancer patients.
A significant part of Dr. Cacciatore’s research focuses on advancing metabolomics, from optimizing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for sample collection and preparation to applying metabolic profiling as a diagnostic tool. In nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, he has developed automated pipelines for the quantification of metabolites, lipoproteins, and glycoprotein-related signals. At ICGEB, Dr. Cacciatore also leads and contributes to collaborative projects focused on isolating acute-phase proteins and characterizing their glycan complexity using NMR, aiming to develop innovative methods to profile inflammatory responses in cancer and other disease-associated conditions.
