Giulio Maria Pasinetti

Giulio Maria Pasinetti is the Program Director of the Center on Molecular Integrative Neuroresilience and is the Saunders Family Chair in Neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS) in New York City. Pasinetti is a Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, and Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at ISMMS.

Pasinetti has an h-index of 81, with over 20,000 citations. He has published over 250 papers indexed in PubMed, as well as 6 book chapters.

Biography

Education

Pasinetti received an M.D. from the Milan University School of Medicine (1982) and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Milan (1988). He was a Research Fellow (Neuropharmacology, 1983-1984) at the University of Milan. Upon moving to the United States, he worked as a Research Associate (Neurogerontology, 1984-1988) and, eventually, as a Senior Research Associate (Neurogerontology, 1989-1990) at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Career

Pasinetti began his career as an assistant professor at the California School of Gerontology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California (1990–1995) in Los Angeles. Since 1996, he has been a faculty member of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where he served as the Aidekman Family Chair and Professor in Neurology until 2009. Pasinetti was also the chief of the Friedman Brain Institute Center of Excellence for Novel Approaches to Neurodiagnostics and Neurotherapeutics, as well as, from 2008 to 2014, the director and principal investigator of the NIH-funded Center of Excellence for Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CERC) in Alzheimer's disease. the Foundation Queen Sofia of Spain Research Center award on Alzheimer's Disease, the Research Career Scientist Developmental Award from the Veterans Health Administration, the Zenith Award from the Alzheimer's Association, the Temple Foundation Discovery Award from the Alzheimer's Association, Dr. Pasinetti was also awarded the 2017 Mary Swartz Rose Senior Investigator Award by The American Society for Nutrition and the American Society for Nutrition Foundation. Most recently, Dr. Pasinetti was named an Honorary Fellow of The University of Bergamo (Università degli Studi di Bergamo).

Grants and Research

With his group, Pasinetti has led research investigations on the neuromolecular mechanisms underlying age-related cognitive decline, dementia, and stress-induced psychological and cognitive impairment with the goal of utilizing repurposed natural products, specifically polyphenols, to promote resilience to such conditions. With this in mind, Pasinetti initiated a drug repurposing study for AD, screening FDA-approved drugs and natural compounds for amyloid-lowering and anti-Aβ aggregation activities, and identified candidates for in vivo testing in AD animal models. As a result of this study, Pasinetti's laboratory identified antihypertensive drugs lacking cardiovascular side effects but with enhanced anti-Aβ oligomerization activity. Pasinetti's research has also validated that repurposing drugs that have already been well-characterized in terms of tolerability and safety profile may have several advantages over novel drugs. These studies provide new information about the potentially detrimental role of commonly prescribed drugs that can be used as a reference for physicians to consider, particularly when treating chronic degenerative disorders such as AD.

Following these findings, as Chief of the Friedman Brain Institute Center of Excellence for Novel Approaches to Neurodiagnostics and Neurotherapeutics, Pasinetti developed drug discovery programs for Alzheimer's disease. Here, he led a primary translational Center to determine whether interventions which appear to work in the preclinical animal model of the disease also show promise in treating patients who have the disease.

Pasinetti is the Director of the NIH funded Botanical Center in Neuroresilience. This research is leading to safe and efficacious treatments of dietary botanical supplements to promote resilience in response to psychological and cognitive impairment.

With his involvement at the Veterans Administration, Pasinetti and his lab identified biomarkers to help diagnose the two signature injuries of the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The focus was on four specific non-coding miRNA which were all found at significantly lower levels in those Veterans who had comorbid TBI plus PTSD, when compared to subjects who had only PTSD. The availability of such biomarkers could provide more precise benchmarks and outcome measures in clinical trials of different TBI or PTSD therapies.

Pasinetti's lab is now working on tracing "downstream" molecular pathways in preclinical rodent models of mTBI, to eventually tie them back to TBI or PTSD symptoms and allow for identification of potential new drug targets to be further developed in the clinical setting.

Taken together, the focus of Dr. Pasinetti's research determining the molecular basis of neurodegenerative disorders and TBI to provide targets for novel therapies has the ultimate goal of identifying unique treatment strategies that can be translated to improve pharmacological treatment in clinical care.

Publications (Partial List)