Dr Luigi Calzolai guest at the Oncology Seminars at Nerviano Medical Sciences

Nerviano,  October 24 -  Dr Luigi Calzolai, Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry at the Medway School of Pharmacy, University of Kent, UK,  has visited Nerviano Medical Sciences and, within the Oncology Seminar Series, he has presented his work concerning "From Mad Cow Disease to Sepsis: how NMR can help".  
After accomplishing his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Siena with Prof. Gianni Valensin in 1996 , he held post doctoral research positions at the University of California (with Dr. Gerd LaMar) and at the Department of Molecular Biology and Biophysicsm, ETH Zurich (with Professor Kurt Wüthrich, Nobel prize in Chemistry in 2002) where he - from 2001 to 2003 - led a group of postdoctors and technicians in expressing, purifying and solving the three-dimensional structure of the first non-mammalian prion proteins. This work led to a possible functional characterization of the prion proteins class responsible for Mad Cow Diseases.  Afterwards he held an an academic position at the University of Insubria, Varese, Italy.  
In 2007 he joined the Medway School of Pharmacy where he began setting up a research group on structural and functional biology, bioinformatics and new tools for predicting drug toxicity.
His specialist area is Structural Biology, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, prion proteins, LPS and the Immune System, Systems Biology.
Dr Calzolai says about his work:" My research is focused on understanding structure-function relationships in biologically important systems by using NMR, molecular biology, gene expression profiling, and biophysics techniques. At the moment I have three active research areas:
·        Structural and functional biology of prion proteins.
·        Lipooligosaccharide modulators of the immune system.
·         Gene expression and structural biology of model organisms (yeast and zebrafish cell lines) exposed to environmental contaminants."
He is actively collaborating with the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, Ispra, Italy; the Frankfurt University, Germany, and the institute of pharmacology research "Mario Negri" in Milan, Italy.