Elena Papaleo

Elena Papaleo is an Associate Professor at the Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), specializing in Bioinformatics and Cancer Systems Biology. Her work focuses on integrating computational and structural biology to address complex biomedical questions.

• Contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goals related to health and well-being.
• Active in interdisciplinary research spanning protein dynamics, enzyme dysfunction, and cancer-relevant genetic variants.

Research Interests:

• Elucidating structural and dynamic properties of proteins, including acid sphingomyelinase and succinate receptor (GPR91).
• Investigating molecular mechanisms of genetic variants of uncertain significance in cancer predisposition.
• Developing structure-based methods for protein function and interaction analysis in autophagy and DNA maintenance.
• Advancing molecular dynamics simulations to study protein-drug and protein-lipid interactions.

Scientific Collaborations:

• Supervising PhD students in projects on childhood cancer variants, autophagy machinery, and molecular binders.
• Collaborating with researchers in genomics, bioinformatics, and structural biology across institutions.

Labs & Teams: Affiliated with DTU Health Technology, she works with interdisciplinary teams to bridge computational approaches with experimental validation in cancer and lysosomal research.