ASOlutions^™

A question that got laughed at

I grew up in Rome — Italian and half Argentinian — in an international school where biology felt like a language for patterns. In ninth grade, in 2010, we were studying ecosystems. I raised my hand and asked: could the human gut be considered an ecosystem, given how many different organisms live there together, competing and cooperating? The teacher pointed me out. The class laughed. Two years later, in August 2012, The Economist put the microbiome on its cover — framing humans as ecosystems of collaborating and competing microbes.

That was my first proof that "parallel thinking" can turn into public truth — and it's still how I build: connect mechanisms, systems, and evidence before the field catches up.

Scotland to Argentina: finding RNA as my home

I studied molecular biology at the University of Dundee in Scotland. In my third year, I heard about Alberto Kornblihtt in Argentina: a world-class RNA scientist and a rare kind of leader who defends public education and scientific institutions. I reached out, got an interview in London while he was traveling, took an eight-hour train from Dundee, and earned an internship in his lab.

From my first day there, I worked on antisense oligonucleotides and alternative splicing. I wasn't "introduced" to RNA later — RNA therapeutics shaped my scientific identity from the beginning.

SMA: science that answers a call

When I arrived in Alberto Kornblihtt's lab, I stepped into something bigger than a project. Alberto is one of the world's most respected RNA scientists — recipient of the 2025 Bunge and Born Prize in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute International Scholar for 15 years. What brought the lab into SMA research wasn't "market opportunity." It was urgency. Patient families — through Familias AME Argentina (FAME) — were desperate for options at a time when Spinraza still wasn't accessible in Argentina.

Alberto was cautious at first — he didn't want to promise what he couldn't deliver. But his decades of splicing biology gave him a path forward: instead of guessing, we would understand the mechanism. That journey led to a discovery we didn't expect — ASO treatment can reshape chromatin and transcription, not just RNA — and that work became a Cell paper and a foundation for improving therapeutic strategies.

Spinraza: FDA-approved Dec 2016. In Argentina, ANMAT authorized nusinersen March 2019.

Academia-grade mechanism. Industry-grade delivery.

During my PhD, our lab was also contracted by Argentine pharmaceutical companies to deliver RNA biology assays and structured reporting through a government-accredited high-level technical services program. It was my first training in "science that ships" — clear experimental plans, reproducible pipelines, and decision-ready results.

That experience is a direct ancestor of how ASOlutions operates today: evidence-first design, validation-minded planning, and reports that teams can act on.

Why I Founded ASOlutions

After my PhD, I went into industry — working in biotechnology across molecular biology and genome engineering. It taught me scale, constraints, and how decisions get made when time and money are real. But my heart stayed in RNA therapeutics, and I kept seeing the same bottleneck:

We now have enough accumulated knowledge to design smarter interventions — the question is how to put that knowledge to work before going to the bench.

ASOlutions is the consultancy I wished existed when I was a researcher. Expert-driven, rational ASO design that helps you choose where to intervene on RNA before you spend months at the bench — built by RNA scientists who understand the mechanism, for teams who want to move faster without losing rigor.