Angelo Lombardo is Group Leader at the San Raffaele Telethon Institute for Gene Therapy (SR-Tiget) and Professor at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy. His team has developed a novel approach to permanently silence gene expression through targeted epigenetic editing and is currently exploiting it to tackle diseases for which gene silencing is a valid therapeutic solution and to shed light into the fundamental principles governing establishment and maintenance of epigenetic silencing.