Paola Anna Erba

President-Elect, European Association of Nuclear Medicine

Prof. Paola Anna Erba is an Associate Professor in Nuclear Medicine and Diagnostic Imaging at the Medical Faculty of Bicocca University, and Chair of the Nuclear Medicine Department at ASST Papa Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo. She is also affiliated with the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands.

She graduated from the Medical Faculty of Insubria University in Varese, later specialising in Nuclear Medicine at the University of Pisa, and in Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She earned a PhD in “Imaging Cardiovascular Infection” at the University Medical Center Groningen, the Netherlands. From 2020 to 2022, she was an Associate Professor in Nuclear Medicine at the Department of Translational Research and New Technologies in Medicine, working at the Regional Centre of Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital in Pisa. She was also the Vice Director of the Nuclear Medicine Residency Programme from 2016 to 2022.

Her research interests broadly cover the fields of infection, inflammation, and oncology. Her main area of focus is cardiovascular infections, where her work has led to the introduction of multimodality imaging in the clinical guidelines for infectious endocarditis and CIED infections. In oncology, her research centres on the validation of new targets/probes for radioimmunoscintigraphy/radioimmuno PET and radioimmunotherapy, as well as conducting translational, early-phase human clinical studies. After her involvement in European COST actions (BM0607, Targeted Radionuclide Therapy (TRNT), and D38, Metal-Based Systems for Molecular Imaging Application), she successfully led a Phase I clinical trial supported by ERA-net TRANSCAN JTC 2011 on Medullary Thyroid Cancer. As Principal Investigator (PI), she coordinated the development of a new molecular probe for this rare cancer. Her work on patients with oligometastatic cancer, funded by a Ministry of Health (MoH) Grant and an AIRC grant, has recently demonstrated the crucial role of imaging in patient management and prognosis. This work has led to the establishment of the first “National Oligometastatic BioImaging Bank”, which aims to identify imaging biomarkers to enhance the understanding of oligometastatic cancer by quantitatively describing disease anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry through multimodal imaging, and integrating/fusing these data with pathology (disease pathophenotyping).

She is an active member of the Italian Association of Nuclear Medicine (AIMN) and the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM), where she currently serves as Education Chair of the European School of Multimodality Imaging and Therapy (ESMIT) and EANM President-Elect 2023–2025. She was recently awarded a Pfizer Independent Education Grant 2020–2021, entitled “European Increasing Awareness of Nuclear Scintigraphy in Cardiac Amyloidosis (EURO-LEARN)”. Within the EANM, she also leads WP2 of the Erasmus+ project “RadioLigand Therapy (RLT) Academy” and is a consortium member of INTERACT-EUROPE – Innovative Collaboration for Inter-specialty Cancer Training across Europe – under the EU4Health Programme (EU4H). She is also an IAEA lecturer and consultant.

Throughout her clinical and research career, Prof. Erba has promoted numerous interdisciplinary clinical studies, creating a network of young and talented investigators, collaborating with local, national, and international colleagues to achieve global visibility, and building national and international networks through joint activities, publications, and patents. Prof. Erba is the author of four theses, more than 206 original scientific papers (as of February 2023, Scopus H-index: 41, 8640 citations), and case reports published in peer-reviewed international journals. She has presented over 150 abstracts at congresses and has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings. She is the editor of five books and 62 book chapters.

Updated: September 2024