A translational approach to the study of neuroinflammation

14 giugno 2017
June 14th 2017
Contatti: 

Venue: Edificio Povo 2, via Sommarive nr. 9, Povo (Tn) - Room B103
 At 11:30 a.m.

  • Fabio Bianco - BrainDTech srl, Milan, Italy

Over 400 different neurological and neurodegenerative disorders have been identified. For most of them, no cure exists, and diagnosis is carried out observing clinical symptoms, which manifest when neurodegeneration has already occurred. Before neurodegeneration, the brain experiences neuroinflammation. Over the last 15 years, significant discoveries have advanced our knowledge in the field of neuroinflammation, opening new exciting opportunities for early diagnosis and efficacious treatments of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. Of crucial importance in the onset of neuroinflammation is the role played by microglia, the resident immune cells in the brain. Microglia is activated at a very early stage of the disease onset, and upon cellular activation, it releases plasma membrane derived microvesicles, which can be found in liquid biopsies. By the use of technologically different approaches, from microfluidics to molecular biology, we have characterized the behavior of such vesicles, and we have observed that the molecular composition of microglia microvesicles is different according to each brain pathology. We found that selected miRNAs are specifically associated to a disease indication, thus creating unique relationships between selected molecular markers and a specific pathology. The possibility of detecting brain disease before neuronal degeneration, represents a revolution in brain disease diagnosis, because it enables the identification of brain pathology-specific patterns of microRNA, many years before clinical symptoms of the pathology, thus allowing therapeutic intervention before degeneration compromises neuronal viability.

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