Elena Marcello is a research fellow in the laboratory of Monica Di Luca, PhD, Department of Pharmacological and Biomolecular Sciences, University of Milano, Italy. She completed her doctoral studies in pharmacotoxicological and pharmacognostic sciences and pharmaceutical biotechnology in 2006, at the University of Milano. She directed her attention to discovering a molecular link between primary and secondary pathogenic events in Alzheimer’s disease, focusing on the amyloid cascade and synaptic dysfunction. In order to study new mechanisms responsible for ADAM10 trafficking, in 2007, she obtained the Dargut and Milena Kemali specialization scholarship in the field of basic and clinical neurosciences and moved to the laboratory of Isabel Pérez-Otaño, PhD, Centro de Investigacion Medica Aplicada (CIMA), Pamplona, Spain. To acquire new expertise in studying protein-protein interactions, in 2011, Dr. Marcello relocated to the laboratory of Joël Bockaert, PhD and Sylvia Claeysen, PhD, Institut de Genomique Fonctionnelle, Montpellier, France, as a Marie Curie fellow, working on the 7FP EU cPADS project on cell permeable peptides as drug delivery system.
Dr. Marcello’s major research achievements are the identification of the synaptic location of ADAM10 and the characterization of the mechanism regulating ADAM10 activity in neurons in physiological and pathological conditions.