News archive
22 stories documenting our research, people, events, and milestones.
Explore another year
Eloisa Torchia and Francesco S. Pasqualini's new review in Biophysics Reviews maps cell-culture platforms for mechanobiology by mechanical cue and experimental throughput, from low-throughput devices to high-throughput plates. It covers how stiffness, viscoelasticity, and topography act on cells (outside-in) and how cell state, such as cell-cycle phase, shapes the response (inside-out), and closes with priorities for standardization.
LigHTS is now published in Advanced Science: an all-optical method that photo-fabricates soft, patterned hydrogels across entire 384- and 1536-well plates, bringing biomimetic substrates to imaging-based ultra-high-throughput screening.
Francesco Pasqualini gives an invited talk at the Bruker Online Organoid Summit on 7 October, presenting “Putting the Cell-Cycle Clock into Organoid Phenotyping: From CALIPERS Cardiac Organoids to Lumenoids and Gastruloids.”
Francesco took part in the ERC in Italy event at the Camera dei Deputati as Vice President of ERC in Italy APS, in collaboration with Radio Parlamentare and the Intergruppo. He spoke about investing in frontier research — not merely spending on it — and moderated a roundtable on “ricerca di frontiera, investimenti strategici e competitività del Paese.”
Melissa Pezzotti and Francesco S. Pasqualini's new review in Biophysics Reviews distills lessons from Melissa's PhD work at the interface of imaging and bioengineering. It connects live-cell reporters, fluorescence imaging, engineered microenvironments, and 2D-to-4D analysis into a practical framework for high-throughput and high-content phenotyping, including a "dataset passport" for more reproducible and interpretable workflows.
SPL is taking part in ESB-ITA 2026 at Politecnico di Milano. Melissa Pezzotti, Eloisa Torchia, and Alessandro Enrico are presenting our work on cell-cycle-aware phenotyping, multiscale rheology, and microgrooved hydrogels for high-throughput mechanophenotyping. Francesco S. Pasqualini is also speaking for ERC in Italy about “How to ERC.” We look forward to exchanging ideas with Italy’s biomechanics community.
The final, fully typeset version of our Nature Communications paper is now online and open access. We are grateful to the editor, reviewers, and the Nature Communications team. Their thoughtful feedback and careful work helped us make the manuscript clearer and stronger for the community.
CALIPERS is now published in Nature Communications. From epithelial cells to human induced pluripotent stem cells and cardiac organoids, the framework makes cell-cycle state an explicit, measurable variable alongside structural and functional live-imaging readouts.
Francesco gave an invited presentation at the 10th World Congress of Biomechanics in Vancouver, sharing SPL's cell-cycle-aware phenotyping platforms for tracking structural and functional changes in engineered tissues.
Francesco joined ERC Days at UNIVPM to discuss frontier-research funding, share experience of the ERC programme, and advocate for conditions that help ambitious research thrive in Italy.
Congratulations to Dr Eloisa Torchia and Dr Melissa Pezzotti, who defended their PhDs after four years of advancing SPL's engineered culture, mechanobiology, and live-imaging platforms. We are delighted that both are continuing the adventure with SPL.
Francesco discussed how artificial intelligence can expand experimental possibilities at the University of Pavia's event on AI in research, while keeping scientific judgment, empirical evidence, and the limits of the technology firmly in view.
Francesco presented SPL's work at Janelia's meeting on the intersection of mechanics and metabolism across biological scales, connecting engineered tissues with a broad community studying how physical context shapes cell state.
MicroSplit is published in Nature Methods, using semantic unmixing to recover richer biological information from multiplexed fluorescence images.
Micro-comb 3D printing is published in Biofabrication, introducing a rapid route to tissue-guiding substrates through micro-embossed printing nozzles.
Francesco, Eloisa, and Melissa presented SPL's work at TERMIS-EU 2026 in Palma de Mallorca, sharing new approaches to cell-cycle-aware imaging, intracellular mechanics, and engineered tissue models.
Our deep-learning workflow for multiplexed FUCCI imaging is published in NPJ Imaging, turning live-cell reporters into quantitative trajectories of cell state.
BIOPOINT is now published in PLOS Computational Biology, offering a particle-based framework for probing nuclear mechanics and cell–matrix interactions with experimentally grounded parameters.
VISTA is published in APL Bioengineering, integrating engineered confinement, live FUCCI imaging, and analysis to follow cell-cycle-aware phenotypes from experiment to quantitative readout.
Francesco gave an invited presentation at the Biophysical Society Bioengineering Subgroup meeting, sharing SPL's approach to rebuilding measurable physiology with engineered cells, materials, and imaging.
The CALIPERS FUCCIplex plasmids are now available through Addgene, making SPL's cell-cycle-aware live-imaging toolkit easier for other laboratories to adopt and extend.
Francesco has been elected Chair-Elect of the Biophysical Society Bioengineering Subgroup, serving as Chair-Elect in 2026 and Chair in 2027, and will organize the subgroup symposium at the 2028 Annual Meeting in San Diego.