Giuseppina Tesco, MD, PhD

Dr. Giuseppina Tesco holds MD and PhD degrees and completed a residency in neurology at the University of Florence, Florence, Italy. She has been studying the molecular mechanisms causing Alzheimer's disease for more than three decades. She did her postdoctoral training in functional genomics with Dr. Rudy Tanzi at Harvard Medical School. She obtained her first faculty position at Harvard Medical School before moving to Tufts School of Medicine. She studies autosomal dominant mutations causing familial Alzheimer’s disease and genetic variants associated with increased risk to develop Alzheimer’s using patient-derived iPSCs and mouse models. She recently discovered a rare loss of function mutation associated with Alzheimer’s in African Americans. Dr. Tesco’s studies contribute to a better understanding of genetic risk factors in the African American population, which are currently understudied. More recently, Dr. Tesco’s team has developed a 3D brain tissue model from human patient-derived iPSCs. Familial Alzheimer’s disease iPSC-derived cultures develop time-dependent Alzheimer’s-related phenotypes and recapitulate transcriptomic features of Alzheimer’s patients. Dr. Tesco’s bioengineered neural tissue represents a unique tool to model Alzheimer’s disease in vitro over time.