Fig. 1

Tommaso A. Dragani. Tommaso A. Dragani is Director of the Research Unit of Genetic Epidemiology and Pharmacogenomics at Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori in Italy. He has been a pioneer of research on the genetic predisposition to cancer. His early studies in animal models led to the identification and characterization of chromosomal loci that determine the inherited predispositions to liver, lung and skin tumorigenesis. He has since extended this research to humans by carrying out population-based case-control studies to identify genetic polymorphisms associated with the risk for and prognosis of lung cancer, thus contributing to the field of complex (polygenic) genetic predisposition to cancer. Dr. Dragani’s research group discovered the mechanism underlying the association between polymorphisms in nicotinic receptor subunit genes and the risks of both lung cancer and nicotine dependence. Additionally, he led the first genome-wide pharmacogenomic study on pain relief, which discovered that multiple loci modulate the response to opioid therapy for cancer pain