(20 October, 2016) Giorgio Mattei, from the research centre “E.Piaggio” of the University of Pisa part of Professor Arti Ahluwalia, has won the Mari Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. The Marie Curie Fellowship is awarded by the European Commission to individual research projects that have been judged to be at the forefront of research and that are written by expert researchers that wish to improve their professional careers working abroad. Mattei’s project, “Endyve” (Engineering Dynamic ViscoElasticity to study cell response) stems from research on “soft and smart materials” conducted at the E.Piaggio Research Centre and aims to characterise the temporal variations of viscoelastic properties of cardiac tissue during foetal to adult age and after a cardiac arrest, to study their influence on cell behaviour. The research will be carried out at Optics11, a high-tech spin-off of Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam specialised in equipment for mechanical characterisation of tissues and biomaterials in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine under the supervision of Professor Davide Iannuzzi and with the department of Anatomy and Embryology of Leiden University Medical Centre under the supervision of Professor Christine Mummery. “This job will allow us to better understand the interaction and mechanisms of mechano-transduction between cells and the surrounding extracellular environment onto which these engage with in order to highlight new control strategies of cellular behaviour. The potentials of this are very relevant to the application in tissue engineering and in-vitro pathophysiological models as, for example, driving stem cell differentiation towards mature cardiomyocytes who have the possibility of limiting or in fact preventing the occurrence and/or progression of fibrosis and tumours”. (Red)
