A factory producing blood stem cells capable of treating deadly diseases such as leukaemia, thereby avoiding the need for bone marrow transplants, as well as other forms of cancer. Long regarded as a sort of Holy Grail of medicine, this dream – once thought unattainable – now seems closer to reality thanks to collaborative research between Andrea Ditadi’s laboratory at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy in Milan and Christopher Sturgeon’s laboratory at the Black Family Stem Cell Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, which has made it possible to identify the role of retinoic acid, also known as vitamin A, in guiding and promoting the generation of blood stem cells in the laboratory. This outstanding scientific partnership has been awarded the €40,000 Aspen 2026 Prize for collaboration between Italia and the United States. This award, established over 10 years ago, is presented annually to a research project in the field of natural sciences, whether theoretical or applied, resulting from collaboration between scientists and organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. The prize was presented to the two winners yesterday at the Rome headquarters of the Institute for the Internationalisation of Leadership and Transatlantic Relations.

Despite the recent difficulties facing scientific research in the US, international collaboration remains a cornerstone, observes Angelo Maria Petroni, Secretary-General of the Aspen Institute Italia. “We established this award well before the political changes in the US, and I hope that the current scaling back of international collaborations is a temporary phenomenon. Even at European level,” he points out, “research still has a very national character: despite being funded by the EU, a truly European research landscape has not yet emerged. Collaboration means working together on the same project because, with the same resources, we can achieve more significant results and strengthen relations between countries.” It is this collaboration that enabled Ditadi’s group and Sturgeon’s group to identify retinoic acid as the factor capable of transforming undifferentiated cells into blood stem cells. This discovery arose from the comparison of independent but complementary observations carried out in the two laboratories, which are among the few in the world conducting such studies. The results, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, have made it possible to pinpoint the exact moment at which to introduce this signal – retinoic acid – to promote the formation of blood stem cells in the laboratory. “The challenge now is to produce them on a large scale,” explains Andrea Ditadi of TIGET. “We knew that vitamin A was essential, so we had the key, but we didn’t know which door to open,” adds the scientist. The challenge was, in fact, to find the right cells that respond to vitamin A and to identify the right moment to administer it in order to transform them into blood stem cells. The researchers found the answers and everything seemed to be in order, but once the cells were transferred into mice, they did not replicate. It was only after a year and a half that a research team at Monash University in Melbourne demonstrated that the results were correct: it was simply a matter of waiting a little longer before transferring the cells so that they could become haematopoietic stem cells. “Producing blood stem cells in the laboratory has long been the Holy Grail of medicine because it means being able to treat those in need of a bone marrow transplant. Now,” concludes Ditadi, “promising prospects are opening up, but the challenge lies in producing the cells on a large scale: something that is feasible within academic networks and biotech companies interested in entering this field.”