During her career Dr Del Bufalo focused her interest in the experimental chemotherapy of tumors and published 101 papers (H index 34; citations 3399) demonstrating the in vitro and in vivo efficacy of several antineoplastic, antiangiogenic and epigenetic drugs, and oligonucleotide antisense as therapeutic agents able to induce apoptosis and/or autophagy in cancer cells. Dr Del Bufalo has also contributed to the understanding of consequences that modulation of antiapoptotic members of bcl-2 family has in tumor progression-associated properties and in vitro/in vivo tumor growth and neoangiogenesis, identifying an important function for bcl-2 and bcl-xL proteins in tumor progression and angiogenesis, and highlighting a mechanism independent from bcl-2 family pro-survival function. In particular, she demonstrated that modulation of bcl-2 in human cancer cells cooperates with hypoxia to increase angiogenesis through HIF-1/VEGF signaling and the involvement of BH4 domain of bcl-2 in this regulation. Dr Del Bufalo’s group has demonstrated that also bcl-xL, another antiapoptotic protein belonging to bcl-2 family, is involved in cancer progression. Very recently Dr Del Bufalo has contributed to the discovery of new functions of bcl-2 demonstrating the ability of bcl-2 to i) regulate the expression of miR-211 and miR378, two microRNA involved in melanoma progression; ii) promote a protumoral M2-like phenotype by tumor-associated macrophages.