Francesca Vinchi, Ph.D.
Sickle Cell Disease
Emory University
Recruited: 2025
Recruited as part of Georgia’s Solve Sickle Cell Initiative, Francesca Vinchi explores how abnormal levels of two nutrients that are required to build up hemoglobin, namely iron and heme, damage cells and tissue and affect hematologic diseases. Her translational laboratory pursues therapies to mitigate that damage and improve blood disorders, including sickle cell disease.
As essential components of hemoglobin, iron and heme play a key role in delivering oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body, via the blood. In sickle cell and other blood-related diseases, the body’s control over these elements is disrupted. Because the body in these diseases has trouble using heme and iron to make hemoglobin, extra heme and iron build up. This extra buildup — “free” heme and iron — creates stress and inflammation in the body and can damage organs. As a result, people can develop a range of symptoms and complications, some of which are lethal.
Dr. Vinchi works to identify the mechanisms that drive the damage caused by free heme and iron. Working with animal models, she has shed new light on how free heme harms endothelial cells and alters the behavior of immune cells (like macrophages). Her research has uncovered how free heme doesn’t just damage cells directly; it also interferes with how they function. Macrophages exposed to excess heme, for example, lose their ability to “fight back” and resolve damage to cells and tissue, thus worsening organ injury and inflammation. Dr. Vinchi’s studies showed that using a drug that binds free heme, Hemopexin, can limit toxic effects and avoid tissue damage and inflammation, as well as help treat sickle cell disease.
More recently, she demonstrated a cause-and-effect relationship between an overload of iron and the severity of other blood disorders called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). In that study, Dr. Vinchi found that a drug that decreases iron levels in the body, vamifeport, actually reduces the harmful effects of too much iron and improves anemia, while lessening MDS symptoms. These findings elevated the drug as a potential treatment for hematologic diseases in humans, including b-thalassemia, sickle cell disease and MDS.
Dr. Vinchi joined the Solve Sickle Cell Initiative as GRA Distinguished Investigator in September 2025 and is working in collaboration with GRA Eminent Scholar Solomon Ofori-Acquah, who was recruited in 2024. She came to Emory after leading the Iron Research Laboratory at the New York Blood Center for seven and a half years. Her prior education and research path include earning a Ph.D. at the Molecular Biotechnology Center in Turin, Italy, and working as a postdoc in iron biology at the University and European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany.
