PhD Course DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE AND HEALTH PLANNING SCIENCES

Main Research Areas

Clinical research activity is conducted mainly in the Department of Women and Children Health that represent a tertiary care hospital and the largest pediatric Hospital in the North East of Italy.

The Department includes all ranges of pediatrics subspecialities with well-developed research programs in cardiology, diabetology, gastroenterology, hematology and oncology, infectious diseases, nephrology, neurology, pneumology and others.

Research activities can also be developed in the fields of pediatric surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, genetics.

The program includes also a specific program dedicated to epidemiology and healthcare organization

Pre-clinical, translational and basic research are mostly conducted  within the Institute of Pediatric Research (IRP), a research Institute whose mission is to make groundbreaking advances in pediatric medicine. To achieve this aim, the Institute adopts a unique multidisciplinary approach that blends ideas from biomedicine, bioengineering, biochemistry and materials science. The research programs that characterize this PhD course are devoted to the following areas:

1. Pediatric oncology: the mission of this area isto improve diagnostics and to identify novel mechanisms of tumorigenesis and new therapeutic targets; to develop innovative strategies for pediatric cancer, through tumor modeling in 3D and in vivo and  gene therapy
2. Predictive medicine: Metabolomics is a novel research field that promises to contribute significantly to the characterization of various disease phenotypes and to the identification of personal metabolic features that can predict response to therapies. The aim of this area is to develop metabolic fingerprints useful to distinguish between different disease phenotypes and to predict a drug’s effectiveness and/or toxicity
3. Regenerative medicine: the principal aim is the development of a series of in vitro and in vivo models to study the application of extracellular vesicles  as therapeutic tool in inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.
4. Genetic and rare diseases:  the aim of this reserch area is studying the biological bases of neurodevelopmental genetically heterogeneous conditions , metabolic and mitocondrial diseases