Paolo is the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Angelini Ventures. He is currently a board member of Argobio and Extend, an observer board member of Pretzel Therapeutics, GenEp, and Arclight Therapeutics, and a member of the investment committee of the Angelini Lumira Bioscience Fund.

Paolo is a life sciences executive with over 20 years of experience in venture capital, R&D, external innovation, and business development. Prior to founding Angelini Ventures, Paolo was the Head of External Innovation R&D at Angelini Pharma, where he led their pre-clinical development group with multiple programs in the areas of CNS and anti-infectives. In 2019 he created the external innovation and corporate venturing units to implement the transformation of the R&D group into an external innovation model. Prior to Angelini Pharma, Paolo was leading drug discovery programs in the areas of neuropsychiatry and neurodegeneration at Novartis Pharma in Switzerland. His team was one of the first to use stem cell-derived neurons for drug screening, biomarker identification and to elucidate novel disease mechanisms. Paolo also contributed to the BD&L neuroscience strategy by closely collaborating with the business development team.

Paolo graduated from the University of Bologna in 2001. His first research experience was at EMBL in Heidelberg, where he studied the biology of the plasmodium malariae.

In 2002, he started working at the Merck Research Laboratories Institute in Rome (IRBM) where he dissected epigenetic mechanisms behind neoplastic formation in leukemia. During this period, he enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Perugia and Harvard University (as a visitor student). During his 4 years at Harvard, Paolo pioneered novel methods to study neurodegenerative diseases using embryonic stem cell-derived neurons. In 2008 he Joined Fred Gage’s lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, to continue his research on neurodegenerative disorders. 

Paolo also holds an MBA degree from the IE Business School in Madrid, Spain and a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology from Harvard University.