Matteo Spinelli

Biography: Dr. Spinelli has an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Sassari. He earned his master's degree in Neurobiology (2012) from Sapienza University of Rome and received his PhD from the Institute of Neurophysiology at the University Cattolica, where he investigated the role of metabolic signals in regulating brain plasticity, particularly exploring the effects of overnutrition on brain health impairment.

His research focused on epigenetic and post-translational mechanisms, examining the correlation between metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. He identified a novel role for aberrant palmitoylation in brain insulin resistance-related impairment of synaptic plasticity and studied the epigenetic mechanisms underlying the transgenerational transmission of maternal insulin resistance-related cognitive dysfunction. Since 2020, he has worked as a senior post-doc at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (UCL London), where he developed a research project to investigate the role of nitrosylation in neurodevelopment. Since 2021, he has been at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome, studying the role of aberrant S-palmitoylation in Alzheimer's disease pathology. His work has uncovered how this post-translational modification affects synaptic plasticity and Aβ metabolism, revealing groundbreaking mechanisms that influence the onset and progression of Alzheimer's disease.

In recent years, including his time at the University of Sassari since 2023, Dr. Spinelli's research has focused on how intranasal injections of neural stem cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs-NSCs) influence cognitive functions. He found that EVs-NSCs can epigenetically restore the transcription of genes related to synaptic plasticity, improve learning and memory, and restore the balance between proliferating and senescent neuron stem cells in the hippocampal neurogenic niche in a mouse model of cognitive decline.