Mauro Pistello is Full Professor of Microbiology and Clinical Microbiology at University of Pisa, Director of Retrovirus Centre, University of Pisa, Clinical Virology Service, Pisa University Hospital, and Specialisation School of Microbiology and Virology. He teaches "Virology" and "Clinical Microbiology" at the School of Medicine and "Molecular Virology" for the Biological Sciences course of the University of Pisa, and "Microbiology and Mechanisms of Infectious Diseases" at the School of Medicine, University “Vita e Salute” San Raffaele, Milan.
He has worked and taught at various institutes of infectious diseases, immunology, veterinary, and molecular medicine in The Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States of America.
His main interests are pathogenesis and development of vaccines and therapies against lentiviruses. He has developed lentiviral vectors to modify the immunomodulatory properties, and monitor stem cells in vivo, and engineer cardiac and respiratory epithelial cells. As part of multicenter studies involving national and foreign institutes, his team has developed gene editing methods to cure genetic diseases of the respiratory epithelia and excise the genome of human immunodeficiency virus integrated into the genome of host infected cells. Additional fields of interest are hepatitis viruses.
He is member of the management committee the European COST action BM1407 "BEAT PCD", focused on the diagnosis and cure of the primary ciliary dyskinesia, a genetic disease of respiratory airways manifesting in the paediatric age.
He has published over 200 refereed papers and various chapters in scientific books. He serves as referee for several national and international funding research agencies and numerous scientific journals.