Press releases

Five days of training, visits to leading global research hubs such as Berkeley and major technology companies including Microsoft and Bosch, as well as meetings with innovation experts and networking opportunities with potential international partners. From 26 to 30 October, ten Italian deep tech startups are visiting the United States on a study visit spanning San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Seattle. The initiative is one of the entrepreneurial support activities provided under Deep Tech Revolution, a programme established by Area Science Park, a national research institution in Italy, to support innovative companies with a strong scientific and technological focus. The mission aims to connect the startups directly with some of the world’s leading research and innovation ecosystems and foster the development of new industrial and commercial relationships. Taking place from 26 to 30 October, the study visit covers some of the United States’ leading innovation hubs, from San Francisco and Silicon Valley to Seattle. Following an initial day of training focused on the American entrepreneurial ecosystem, the itinerary includes visits to the University of California, Berkeley campus and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, two major centres of scientific and technological research. The programme also features meetings with researchers from the ISSNAF (Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation) network, which brings together Italian scientists and scholars working in North America, as well as visits to organisations such as SRI International, an independent research centre, and MBC BioLabs, which specialises in supporting biotechnology startups. Additional meetings have been arranged according to the startups’ respective fields of activity. Startups operating in the life sciences will visit ImYoo, a Bay Area biotechnology company, while those working on energy and climate technologies will meet researchers at Bosch’s R&D centre, with the opportunity to present their projects to the group’s corporate venture capital fund. The second part of the mission will take place in Seattle, with visits to major international companies such as Microsoft and T-Mobile, as well as 9Zero, a hub dedicated to climate technologies, and the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds, a centre specialising in supporting research and the commercialisation of clean energy technologies. Throughout the five days, the programme will also include startup project presentations, networking sessions and opportunities to engage with potential industrial partners and investors, with the aim of exploring collaboration and business development opportunities in the US market. «Through Deep Tech Revolution, we aim to support startups not only in developing their technologies, but also in the process of bringing research results to market,” said Roberto Pillon, Head of the Business Generation Unit at Area Science Park. “The study visit to the United States offers an opportunity to engage with some of the world’s leading innovation ecosystems, learn about entrepreneurial development models and build relationships with potential industrial partners, research partners and investors. This is an important step for science-intensive projects, which need expertise, resources and connections in order to grow». The projects developed by the ten startups span a wide range of fields, from life sciences to advanced digital technologies, from research into new materials to the energy transition. Their applications include surgical robotics and medical technologies, biotechnology for food production and the development of new therapies, energy storage and conversion systems, superconductivity, satellite communications, digital simulation and quantum computing. These are all research-intensive sectors in which the development of new technological solutions requires specialised scientific expertise, advanced infrastructure and effective pathways for transferring research results to the market.   The Programme and the Startups Launched in February 2026, Deep Tech Revolution is the programme through which Area Science Park supports the development of entrepreneurial projects based on frontier technologies in four areas: materials science, advanced digital technologies, green energy value chains and life sciences. The programme initially envisaged funding five startups, selected through a call for applications that attracted 80 complete submissions from 14 Italian regions. In May, in recognition of the high scientific and technological value of the projects submitted, Area Science Park decided to double the programme’s total funding from €1 million to €2 million, enabling a further five startups to join the programme, selected according to the original ranking. Each of the ten companies receives €200,000 in support, half in the form of a non-repayable grant and the other half through high-technology research and development services and business growth support services. The distinctive feature of the twelve-month programme is access to Area Science Park’s research infrastructure and advanced laboratories, including facilities dedicated to genomics and epigenomics, electron microscopy and materials analysis, as well as high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. These resources are complemented by training, capacity-building, networking and internationalisation activities, of which the study visit to the United States is one of the key stages. The first cohort, which began its activities in February, includes Soundsafe Care (Pisa), which develops ultrasound-based robotic solutions for non-invasive surgical procedures; Yeastime (Rome), which uses ultrasound to improve the productivity of microalgae cultivation for the food, nutraceutical and biotechnology sectors; Novac (Modena), which is developing structural supercapacitors for energy storage in electric mobility; Magnetic Future (Bologna), which works on high-temperature superconducting switches for applications in energy and other advanced sectors; and SatEnlight (Milan), which develops optical technologies to increase the speed, reliability and security of satellite communications. Five additional startups joined the programme in May: LivGemini (Rome), which uses digital twin technologies for the diagnosis and personalised treatment planning of thoracic aortic aneurysms; Antares Electrolysis (Genoa), which develops next-generation electrolysers for hydrogen production; DNAswitch (Padua), which is developing new therapeutic approaches for Huntington’s disease; EMC Gems (Udine), which specialises in advanced electromagnetic simulations and digital twin technologies for the design of electronic devices; and Rotonium (Padua), which is working on the development of room-temperature photonic quantum processors.

The 18th edition of the Multinational Congress on Microscopy (18MCM), one of the leading international events dedicated to microscopy and its most advanced applications, will be held in Trieste from 12 to 17 September 2027. The city was selected as the host venue following a bid submitted by the Italian Society for Microscopical Sciences (SISM), in collaboration with Area Science Park, and particularly its Electron Microscopy Laboratory, which draws on a well-established wealth of expertise, cutting-edge instrumentation and international partnerships. The congress is expected to bring more than 400 participants to Trieste, including researchers and early-career scientists from across Europe. This is comparable to the attendance recorded at the previous edition, held in Portorož (Slovenia) in September 2025. “Hosting the 18th edition of the Multinational Congress on Microscopy in Trieste is an important recognition of the scientific community in our region and further confirms the city’s role as an international research hub, built on an ecosystem of excellence and strong partnerships,” said Prof. Caterina Petrillo, President of Area Science Park. She added: “For the institution I lead, the congress is further confirmation of the excellence of the path undertaken in recent years, which has involved significant investments in infrastructures and expertise dedicated to materials science and advanced electron microscopy. This commitment has also been recognised at European level, as demonstrated by the recent success of the Microscopy Europe project, which successfully passed the European evaluation thresholds and was included in the ESFRI Roadmap 2026. Microscopy Europe will be the first European distributed infrastructure dedicated to advanced electron microscopy for the characterisation of materials at the atomic scale. Area Science Park contributed to its design and will continue to contribute to the development of its scientific programme over the next ten years.” The Multinational Congress on Microscopy is an internationally significant platform for scientific, technological and educational exchange. “The 18th edition of the Multinational Congress on Microscopy will provide an important opportunity to bring the international microscopy community together in Trieste and to discuss the latest scientific and technological developments in the field,” emphasises Regina Ciancio, Head of the Electron Microscopy Laboratory at Area Science Park and Chair of the Congress. “The programme will span from materials science to life sciences, with a particular focus on the new frontiers of advanced microscopy, instrumentation and emerging methodologies. Significant attention will also be devoted to early-career researchers, training, and dialogue among research organisations, scientific infrastructures and industry.” For further information on 18MCM, visit the 18MCM website.

More than ten million cells analysed in less than two hours, with memory requirements approximately three times lower than those of the best existing tools and processing speeds up to forty times faster on the largest datasets. This remarkable achievement was made possible by a team of researchers from the University of Trieste, Area Science Park, SISSA and Human Technopole, who developed DEVIL (Differential Expression with Variational Inference Learning), a new high-performance computational tool. The study has been published in Nature Communications. Understanding which genes are active within cells is fundamental to advancing our knowledge of disease and developing new therapeutic approaches. Today’s most advanced technologies enable researchers to measure gene activity in millions of cells from dozens or even hundreds of patients, generating unprecedented volumes of data for biomedical research. However, this revolution also brings with it two major challenges: on the one hand, the risk of errors in data interpretation, and on the other, the difficulty of analysing such large volumes of information. The first challenge is computational. Analysing millions of cells requires enormous computing power. Traditional methods are too slow and consume excessive memory when handling datasets of this scale, creating a bottleneck that risks undermining the advantages offered by modern data collection technologies. The second challenge is statistical. Cells collected from the same patient tend to resemble each other more closely than cells from different patients, as they share the same biological background, environment and individual characteristics. Ignoring this aspect—as many currently available tools do—can lead to biased statistical conclusions, with the risk of identifying cellular changes as “significant” when they are not, or conversely failing to detect genuine ones. To address both issues, the researchers developed DEVIL, successfully combining statistical rigour with computational speed in an innovative way. From a computational perspective, DEVIL, which was also developed with support from the AIRC Foundation, has been specifically designed to efficiently exploit the latest parallel computing architectures commonly used in artificial intelligence. Moreover, DEVIL is not only faster but also significantly more memory-efficient. This is a crucial advantage, as analyses previously restricted to major computing centres can now be carried out by smaller research laboratories and infrastructures. From a statistical perspective, DEVIL tackles the problem through a Bayesian approach that correctly accounts for the structure of the data, treating cells from the same patient as correlated observations and thereby distinguishing differences between patients from genuine differences in cellular activity. “This work would not have been possible without ORFEO, Area Science Park’s high-performance computing and data centre, recently upgraded through funding from Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR),” said Stefano Cozzini, Director of the Institute for Research and Technological Innovation at Area Science Park. “The availability of state-of-the-art GPUs, offering exceptional computing performance, together with the optimisation of algorithms carried out by our team for this architecture, has enabled DEVIL to tackle problems on a significantly larger scale than previously possible. This achievement is the result of a highly skilled multidisciplinary team that has been able to fully leverage the capabilities of the infrastructure and technologies available”. ”Differential expression analysis, —that is, the statistical method used to identify which genes are significantly more or less active across different biological conditions—is a mature technology,” explained Giulio Caravagna of the University of Trieste. “However, the transition to single-cell data has introduced statistical and computational challenges that make the integrated analysis of large patient cohorts particularly difficult. Our work was conceived specifically to overcome this bottleneck, combining methodological innovation with high-performance computing to enable the analysis of millions of cells from hundreds of patients”. “In the development of DEVIL, the synergy between classical and Bayesian statistical methods represents a distinctive strength within the oncology literature,” added Leonardo Egidi of the University of Trieste. “It makes DEVIL both a highly efficient computational protocol and a methodologically robust one. Future developments may involve spatio-temporal models for multiple patients and further computational approximations based on theoretical properties that are currently under investigation—a fascinating combination of statistical, computational and biological expertise”. DEVIL was validated on two real-world biological case studies. In the first, focused on the identification of immune cell populations, the tool demonstrated greater accuracy and specificity in detecting biologically relevant functions. In the second, which investigated the ageing of human muscle tissue, DEVIL identified age-related transcriptional changes in a more robust and biologically meaningful manner, reducing noise and highlighting key processes for downstream analyses. Released as free and open-source software, DEVIL is now available to laboratories and hospitals worldwide, paving the way for a new generation of large-scale genomic analyses to support cancer research, the study of degenerative diseases and the advancement of personalised medicine.  

Under the claim “Shaping Data, Shaping the Future!”, the graduation event for the second edition of the Master’s in Data Management and Curation (MDMC) has concluded. The final thesis defenses covered topics ranging from FAIR data pipelines for neuroscience and genetic sequencing to data extraction tools for protein crystallization, the application of advanced technologies like GraphRAG for manufacturing data, and repositories for X-ray absorption spectroscopy. A highlight of the event was the Keynote Lecture by Massimiliano Novelli, Senior Data Curation Scientist at the European Spallation Source ERIC, who provided an overview of global challenges and best practices in managing international-level data infrastructures. The Master’s in Data Management and Curation is a one-year advanced training course promoted by Area Science Park and SISSA. It is dedicated to training highly qualified professionals in the management, enhancement, and curation of scientific data using a FAIR-by-design approach. With the second edition wrapped up, attention now turns to the upcoming edition of the Master’s program, with applications open until 1:00 PM on June 30, 2026. The program lasts approximately 10 months and is taught entirely in English. It combines intensive face-to-face lectures in Trieste with a six-month internship at research laboratories and partner institutions, during which participants develop an applied project work. Students will gain privileged access to Area Science Park’s ORFEO HPC infrastructure. This includes a dedicated virtual machine, storage space, and computing resources designed to support hands-on training activities in data management and data-intensive research. Five scholarships offered by Area, SISSA, and OGS are available. These cover the enrollment fee and provide an additional €3,000 allowance to cover living expenses in Trieste during the in-person lecture period (September–December 2026). Depending on financial availability resulting from agreements/conventions with external organizations—such as the Friuli Venezia Giulia Autonomous Region, other research institutions, or private companies—further financial aid, scholarships, and prizes may become available. Full details, the admission call, entry requirements, and the course structure are available on the MDMC webpage.