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Paola Fossa got her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1992 at University of Genoa, Italy. Senior Researcher since 1997, she has spent some training periods at Department of Chemistry, Leiden University, Dipartimento Farmaco-Chimico, University of Bari and Institut fur Pharmazeutische Chemie, Dusseldorf University, acquiring skills and experience in computational chemistry and drug design. She is Associate Professor since 2005 at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Genoa. Her main research activity concerns the application of computational strategies to medicinal chemistry issues, mainly rational design and identification of CFTR modulators, ligands for GPCRs receptors (serotoninergic, cannabinoid and trace amine receptors), PDE4 inhibitors. She has published about 110 papers and is referee for several medicinal chemistry journals. She has been responsible of different research projects funded by University of Genova and Italian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

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Pasqualina D'Ursi is a researcher at the Institute for Biomedical Technologies (ITB) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). She received a BS degree in Biological Science and a Phd in Molecular Medicine at the University of Milan. Her research activity is focused on understanding the relationship between the molecular structural of a protein and its function. This information is necessary to provide predictions on the effects of disease-causing mutations and positively help drug-design. Computational methods such as molecular modeling, docking, molecular dynamics and bioinformatics have been applied in her research to analyze protein-ligand interactions for drug discovery (Cystic Fibrosis, Covid19, HIV and Endocrine Disruptors) and the study of the structure-function relationship of mutated proteins involved in the coagulation cascade and rare diseases.

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Nicoletta Pedemonte obtained her PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Turin, Italy in 2007 and a postgraduate specialization in Clinical Pathology at the University of Genoa, Italy in 2011. She is Senior Scientist at the UOC Genetica Medica of the IRCCS Istituto Giannina Gaslini in Genoa, Italy, where she leads a group of seven researchers. She has a strong expertise in drug discovery strategies and functional genomics. Her research activity is focused on transepithelial ion transport mechanisms in airway epithelial cells, mechanisms associated to mutant protein maturation and degradation, and identification of novel small molecules to rescue mutant CFTR protein in cystic fibrosis. She has authored 79 international peer-reviewed publications with 3,469 citations, H-factor 24 (Scopus). Scopus Author Identifier: 8095389700

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Isabelle Callebaut is CNRS Research Director at Sorbonne University (Paris). She is Engineer in chemistry and received her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Agronomical Sciences in Gembloux (Belgium), in 1993. Her PhD thesis was devoted to the development of vaccine strategies against retroviruses. During her post-doctoral training at the University Pierre et Marie Curie, she specialized in the analysis and prediction of protein structures. Her current research is centered on structural bioinformatics, developing and applying original methods for the analysis of sequence-structure-function relationships and for the characterization of the dark proteome. A lot of applications focus on medically important proteins, among which CFTR. Current research interests in the field of cystic fibrosis include the understanding of the function, dysfunctions and modulation of the CFTR protein, in particular by using molecular dynamics simulations. She is the author/co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed articles (H-factor 58, > 10000 citations (Web of Science)).