Position/Role

Full Professor of Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano.

Professional career

After the Master Degree in Biomedical Engineering, in 2000 she receives her PhD in Bioengineering at at Politecnico di Milano, where she develops her career. In 2003 she founds a Bioengineering research unit, inside the IRRCS Galeazzi Orthopaedic Institute in Milano, which she directs until 2008. Since 2010 she founds and directs the Mechanobiology laboratory at the Dept of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta”. From 2013 to 2015 she is the coordinator of the PhD program in Bioengineering. Since 2014 she founds and directs the LuCId lab, for live cell imaging. Since 2015 she is the referent person of Politecnico di Milano for the frame agreement with IRCCS Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milano.

Scientific results

Her scientific activity focuses on bioengineering, on the understanding and the consequent control of biological mechanisms through engineering devices for cell culture outside the human organism. An important result was that of succeeding in orienting the production of organoids (simplified and miniaturized versions of an organ produced in vitro), for example brain tissue or bone tumor metastasis, using miniaturized devices called "millifluidic bioreactors". Manuela Raimondi has designed such systems to produce and maintain living tissue in culture to be used for the experimentation of new drugs, such as chemotherapeutic and anti-inflammatory drugs, in a much more realistic way than conventional cell culture, reducing the use of experimental animals. In her studies she focused on "mesenchymal" cells, i.e. stem cells of bone and cartilage tissue, which provide the natural regenerative and reparative capacity to the tissues of the human body.

Editorial work and publications

She is the author of around 200 scientific publications, among which: 

[2018] Marturano-Kruik A, A.Villasante, K.Yaeger, S. Ambati, A. Chramiec, M.T. Raimondi, G. Vunjak-Novakovic. Biomechanical regulation of drug sensitivity in an engineered model of human tumor. Biomaterials. 2018 Jan;150:150-161. doi: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2017.10.020

[2018] Marturano-Kruik A, Nava MM, Yaeger K, Chramiec A, Hao L, Robinson ST, Guo XE, Raimondi MT, Vunjak-Novakovic G. Human bone perivascular niche-on-a-chip for studyingmetastatic colonization. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Feb 6;115(6):1256-1261. doi:10.1073/pnas.1714282115.

[2016] Garcia B, Rodriguez Matas JF, Raimondi MT. Modeling of the mechano-chemical behavior of the nuclear pore complex: current research and perspectives. Integrative Biology, 8(10): 1011-1021 doi: 10.1039/c6ib00153j

[2016] Nava MM, Di Maggio N, Zandrini T, Cerullo G, Osellame R, Martin I, Raimondi MT. Synthetic niche substrates engineered via two-photon laser polymerization for the expansion of human mesenchymal stromal cells. Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, doi: 10.1002/term.2187

[2016] Nava MM, Piuma A, Figliuzzi M, Cattaneo I, Bonandrini B, Zandrini T, Cerullo G, Osellame R, Remuzzi A, Raimondi MT. Two-photon polymerized "nichoid" substrates maintain function of pluripotent stem cells when expanded under feeder-free conditions. Stem Cell Research and Therapy, 7:132. doi: 10.1186/s13287-016-0387-z

Awards and prizes

Manuela Raimondi received many grants and awards, among which three ERC grants:

2000-2001: Young Investigator Award from Politecnico di Milano.

2005-2006 e 2006-2007: Research Award from the Cariplo Foundation.

2006 e 2007: Rocca Award from the MIT-Italy program.

2010-2011: Research Award from the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

2011-2012: Young Researcher Award from Politecnico di Milano.

2015-2020: ERC-CoG-2014 Grant award in stem cell mechanobiology, from the European Research Council. Project NICHOID.

2017-2018: ERC-PoC-2016 Grant award in stem cell bioengineering, from the European research Council. Project NICHOIDS.

2019-2020 ERC-PoC-2018 Grant award in microfluidic bioengineering, from the European Research Council. Project MOAB.

2018-202: Research Award from the Italian Ministry of University and Research.