Loretta del Mercato Named Officer of the Italian Order of Merit

On 2 June 2026, Dr. Loretta Laureana del Mercato, Research Director at CNR-Nanotec in Lecce and one of the founding members of the Italian Pancreatic Cancer Community (IPCC), was awarded the honor of Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.

Loretta Laureana del Mercato is a Senior Research Scientist (Dirigente di Ricerca) at the Institute of Nanotechnology of the Italian National Research Council (Cnr-Nanotec) in Lecce, where she leads the "3D Cell Sensing" research group, and is a founding member of the Italian Pancreatic Cancer Community. For over twenty years she has developed nanotechnologies and sensing platforms for the life sciences, with a research line specifically dedicated to pancreatic cancer: from 3D tumor models that reproduce its heterogeneity to optical sensors that measure, in real time, how tumor cells respond to drugs. This work is supported by several competitive European and national grants focused specifically on pancreatic cancer.

Loretta L. del Mercato's research aims to bring precision medicine to pancreatic cancer. Her group studies the heterogeneity of interactions between tumor cells and their microenvironment in 3D pancreatic tumor models, develops innovative sensors and materials to monitor pH, nutrients and tumor cell metabolism in real time, and investigates the role of circulating tumor cells in disease progression, in search of new strategies to counter it. This work, supported by several competitive European and national grants dedicated specifically to pancreatic cancer, has been published in leading international journals, including PNAS, ACS Nano and Small, and continues to bring laboratory research closer to the specific needs of each cancer patient.