Silke Krol was trained in Chemistry at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University in Münster, Germany where she obtained her Master degree in Chemistry in 1997. This was followed by the PhD with the topic of her thesis on the biophysical characterization of hydrophobic pulmonary surfactant components. She received her PhD in 2000 and continued working as a postdoc until 2001. Then she worked first as a post-doctoral fellow (2001-2003) and then as a junior researcher (2003-2007) at the INFM (Istituto nazionale di fisica materia), Institute of Physics, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy. She developed nanodrugs and protective nanocoatings for cells in an EU project entitled “Nanocapsules with functionalized surfaces. With this approach she was one of the pioneers in nanomedicine in Genoa. A second EU project used the protective cell coating to protect pancreatic islets for a Bioartificial Pancreas for Type I Diabetes Therapy. From 2007-2010 she established and headed the „NanoBio“lab@LA (NADA) (laboratory of nano analysis, drug delivery, and diagnostics) at CBM in Trieste, Italy, a small enterprise dedicated to technology transfer from bench to bedside. Here her research focused on developing anticancer drugs and vehicles that allow the delivery through the blood brain barrier. In 2010, she established and headed the laboratory for Nanomedicine at the National Institute for Neurology ”Carlo Besta”, Milan, Italy. As a principal investigator and advisor to the director of the Nanomedicine Centre, where research activities focus on the design of nanoparticles for imaging and therapy of neurodegenerative disease, epilepsy and cancer. In this contest, she developed a very strong interest in exosomes and their importance for theranostics and the metastasis of tumors. This work was extended and intensified in the field of liquid biopsy for early diagnosis of cancer in the Institute of Oncology “Giovanni Paolo II”, a research hospital in Bari, Italy where she established the laboratory of translational nanotechnology in 2016.
