The Laboratory of Neurobiology for Translational Medicine supports the clinic from a biochemical, genetic and molecular point of view, collecting as much data as possible from each patient in order to integrate and better characterize the clinical information.
The lab is equipped for biochemical analyses (western blot, immunoprecipitation, protein expression, bioinformatics), immunohistochemistry (fluorescence) and has close collaborations with other research groups to perform mass spectrometry and genetic analyses (rtPCR, PCR, Sequencing).
Research
The main research activity concerns the analysis of human samples from blood of patients with central nervous system (CNS) diseases such as Ischemia, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and others. Samples are used to investigate the molecular, genetic and proteomic factors that might vary during the onset and the progression of the studied diseases.
The laboratory is mainly focused on the identification of new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of neurological diseases. We also search potential rehabilitation biomarkers, to study how the rehabilitation process can induce biomolecular modifications in patients.
With a personalized medicine approach, our goal is to identify a “biological footprint” of CNS pathologies that could help to improve disease diagnosis and monitoring, pharmacological research and rehabilitation outcomes.
For the experimental analyses, we mainly use biological samples from the CCPP Biobank, enabling us to compare the experimental results with the clinical information collected from donors by our healthcare professionals at the time of sample collection.
Team
The leader/supervisor of the laboratory is Marco Feligioni, PhD (Pharmacologist).
The members of the Lab staff are Pamela Cappelletti, PhD, Maria Lo Giudice, PhD, and Melania Filareti, biologist.
Fluorescence microscope, Nikon Eclipse Ti2-E
Operator preparing a gel electrophoresis experiment
Image of isolated peripheral human blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) with double antibody labelling (green and red) and DAPI staining
