Pietro Spitali received his M.Sc. in Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Ferrara in 2007 cum laude. He received his PhD in 2010 for the work he did on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) at the Medical Genetics section of the University of Ferrara on the developed of antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) targeting exons of the DMD gene at the pre-mRNA level.

In 2010 he moved to the Human Genetics department of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands as post-doctoral fellow in the group of prof. Annemieke Aartsma-Rus, where he kept working on ASOs development in pre-clinical research. During his post-doc Pietro focused on understanding the regulation of the DMD gene and on the identification of non-invasive biomarkers for patients affected by DMD and other neuromuscular disorders. During this period he received funding from the Prinses Beatrix Spierfonds, the AFM-Téléthon and the Duchenne Parent Project.

Since 2014 he works as assistant professor at the Human Genetics department of the LUMC. His lab focuses on identification of biomarkers in neuromuscular disorders using omics data combined with the development of novel statistical methods to model disease trajectories in pre-clinical studies as well as in natural history studies and clinical trials. Beside the translational biomarker research, Pietro is also actively researching the basic mechanism of gene expression regulation by studying RNA binding proteins, pre-mRNA synthesis and gene expression with spatial technologies.