MNESYS - A Multiscale integrated approach to the study of the nervous system in health and disease

The last decades have seen an explosion of neuroscience research and of the understanding of the nervous system functioning in health and disease. Despite the recent advances, however, we currently lack a clear understanding of a number of key processes underlying nervous system functions and available clinical and instrumental measurements are able to capture only partially the underlying physio-pathological mechanisms, thus leading to a significant difficulty in the care of subjects with nervous system disorders. As delineated in the Italian National Research Plan an unmet need in biomedical research in general, and in neuroscience in particular, is the lack of integration between research approaches with different experimental focuses such as molecular, clinical and computational neuroscience, also due to the different core competencies and professional figures involved in these areas of research. Moreover, basic research in these areas tends to focus on disease categories based on the main driver of the pathologic process (e.g. neurodegenerative diseases, etc.). However, similar patho-physiological drivers are likely to occur in different complex and heterogeneous illnesses of the nervous system resulting in diverse clinical phenotypes due to the concurrence of other intrinsic (developmental, genetic/molecular) and extrinsic (environmental, social) factors and co-morbidities.

In this program we decided to focus on a small number of key topics, highly relevant for the understating of the nervous system functions in health and disease, with the objective of identifying major pathological drivers of different conditions, allowing: 1) the assessment of biomarkers to identify patients at preclinical or early stage of disease, allowing to set-up individualized and preventive strategies for improving prognosis and patient's quality of life; 2) the identification of new cellular and molecular targets for the development of innovative neuropharmacological tools; 3) the set-up of biology-inspired digital twins, driven by multi-modal data and relying on intrinsically multi-scale computational techniques. A medium-long term goal may lead to genomically informed and individualized treatments, based on the patient’s own genetics, biological profile, environment and habits.

Proposer

Università degli Studi di Genova

Hub

MNESYS S.C.a R.L - Società Consortile a responsabilità limitata

Spoke

• S1 - Neurodevelopment, social cognition and interaction (SSSA Principal Investigator: Silvestro Micera);
• S4 - Perception, movement and brain-body interactions (SSSA Principal Investigator: Silvestro Micera);
• S6 - Neurodegeneration, trauma and stroke (SSSA Principal Investigator: Silvestro Micera).

Institutes/Research Centers involved

• The BioRobotics Institute
• Institute of Mechanical Intelligence
• Tecip Institute
• Health Science Interdisciplinary Research Center

Period

36 months - 01/11/2022-31/10/2025

Budget SSSA

1.276.450,00 euro