Institutes

Human genetics of neurological disorders

team-item

Group leader

Federica Esposito

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The complexity of Neuroscience requires solid basic research to explore the mechanisms underlying physiological and pathological mechanisms but also the possibility to translate the basic research findings in the clinical setting. For this reason, translational research activities are extremely important for the development of new tools/approaches aimed to treat patients with an individualized approach. Moreover, there is an increasing need of connection between Neuroscience and other research areas, including immunology, infectiology, metabolic medicine, for the better understanding of complex neurological disorders and its management. The study of omics data, with particular focus on genetics, epigenetics and immunosequencing, will continue to increase given the complexity of disorders like multiple sclerosis. So far, significant efforts have been devoted in understanding the susceptibility factors involved in the disease but still several factors need to be explored to better understand the heterogeneity of the disease in terms of clinical manifestation, treatment response and disease severity. Deep phenotyping and the use of the more advanced technologies, including deep sequencing and single cell sequencing, will be strongly exploited in the next future.

Research activity

My research activity aims to understand the factors involved in multiple sclerosis and its heterogeneous clinical manifestation, with an integrative approach that takes into account different complementary aspects of the disease. This requires a detailed clinical characterization, fundamental for the correct definition of the phenotype to be studied, and represents also a strength of our research activity, given the strong proximity with the clinical setting and the translational approach that characterizes our research. The close connection between data analysis and the clinical counterpart creates the ideal setting towards precision medicine.

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