Trained as a Medical Doctor and Specialist in Internal Medicine at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Dr. Vacca underwent a PhD in molecular biology in the Lab of Antonio Moschetta (Mario Negri Sud) and University of Chieti-Pescara. Dr. Vacca was therefore appointed at the MRC Human Nutrition Research and the University of Cambridge as a Clinician Scientist, working also as a Consultant at the Cambridge University Hospitals in the Lipids/MASH Services, where he joined teams led by world-leading experts in obesity/lipotoxicity (Antonio Vidal-Puig) and nutrition/metabolomics (Jules Griffin).
He is currently Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine at the University of Bari (IT) and Principal Investigator at the Roger Williams Institute of Hepatology (London, UK). Dr. Vacca’s track record falls in the field of systemic/hepatic metabolism in the context of obesity/MASH/HCC with expertise in pre-clinical and translational studies, functional genomics, and systems biology.
In the last years, he has made significant accomplishments in the field of obesity/lipotoxicity as drivers of liver disease, as well as in describing the rewiring of cellular metabolism in cancer. Most of his findings have great translational potential for obesity-associated complications including MASLD, and have been published in highly reputed journals including Nature Metabolism, Gastroenterology, J Hepatology, Hepatology, Cardiovascular Research, Molecular Metabolism and BBA. MV co-leads with Prof Vidal-Puig (Cambridge) and James Perfield (Lilly) the LITMUS pre-clinical group, which has generated a large collection of preclinical MASH models to generate a consensus and develop a coherent preclinical pipeline for reverse translation of novel MASH biomarkers.s.
