Bioinformatics & Biostatistics
Elia Biganzoli is a biologist and Full Professor of Medical Statistics at the University of Milan, as well as a Guest Professor at KU Leuven. For more than thirty years he has moved effortlessly across biostatistics, artificial intelligence, clinical epidemiology, and cancer biology, showing that numbers and molecules ultimately speak the same language — you just need to know how to listen.
His career began in the world of drug discovery and high-throughput screening, where he quickly learned that behind every drug lie mountains of data waiting to be tamed. He never stopped since: he spent 25 years as Senior Biostatistician at the National Cancer Institute in Milan, and has supported institutions and companies in developing biomarkers and research protocols, always keeping one foot in academia and the other in innovation.
Internationally recognized as a leading expert in tumor dormancy, Elia has helped clarify the mechanisms that regulate cancer latency and reactivation. His recent work focuses on understanding how inflammation, physical activity and biological aging intertwine — often with the support of machine learning, as long as it is sustainable and explainable (black boxes, better avoided).
He is Principal Investigator or co-PI of numerous national and international projects, including initiatives funded by the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of University and Research, AIRC, the European Commission and the ERAPerMed program. He leads the HEBE project, dedicated to understanding how physical activity can modulate inflammation and biological aging, supported by the UNIMI Special Projects within the PNRR framework.
This line of research has also contributed to the conceptual development of INES, of which Elia is co-founder, and which explores how environment and life experiences shape health and well-being.
Elia also plays a key role in several active ERC projects: from the ERC-CoG FAT-BC, investigating the role of adiposity in breast cancer, to the ERC-CoG MAMELI, and the ERC-PoC FLORA, where he contributes to the development of innovative methodologies for the analysis of complex data.
With a PhD in Medical Statistics, over 250 publications and decades of contributions to survival analysis, biomarker development and big-data methodologies, Elia’s work goes well beyond numbers: he leads a historical epidemiology project on the Sforza Registers, and for fifteen years has brought his expertise to ethics committees.
And when he is not dealing with models, biomarkers or data pipelines, he happily lets chaos do its part. Paradoxically, that’s often where some of his best ideas come from.