Giulio Cossu (GC) is recognized for his pioneering work on skeletal myogenesis and for the first cell therapy trial with stem cells for muscular dystrophy.

He originally showed that neural tube (Vivarelli and Cossu, Dev. Biol. 1986) and, subsequently, dorsal ectoderm (Cossu et al., Development 1996) activate, through different Wnts, distinct myogenic programs in epaxial and hypaxial somitic progenitors, a notion now in developmental biology textbooks. He also pioneered studies on myogenic cell heterogeneity (Cossu and Molinaro, Curr. Topics Dev. Biol. 1987) by showing intrinsic differences among embryonic, foetal and adult myogenic progenitors (Biressi et al. Dev. Biol. 2007) whose molecular basis he recently elucidated (Messina et al. Cell 2010): these studies outlined an unforeseen parallelism with the hematopoietic system, supporting the idea that at least some tissues of developing mammals are built in subsequent stages by different families of progenitors.

Giulio Cossu received his MD degree from the University of Rome in 1997. He trained as a Fogarty post-doctoral at the Wistar Institute, University of Pennsylvania (1980-83), and then became Associate Professor at the Dept. of Histology and Medical Embryology of the University of Rome "La Sapienza". In 1991 GC was promoted full Professor and in 1993-4 was a visiting professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 2000 he was appointed Director of the “Stem Cell Research Institute” of the Hospital San Raffaele in Milan. In 2003 he was appointed as Scientific Coordinator of the newly created San Raffaele Biomedical Science Park of Rome, while maintaining is position in Milan. Since 2005 he is Professor of Histology and Embryology at the University of Milan. In 2008, he was appointed Director of the newly created San Raffaele Division of Regenerative Medicine. In 2012 GC became Professor of Human Stem cell Biology at University College London, and in September 2013 Constance Thornley Professor of Regenerative Medicine at the University of Manchester.