Emeritus Professor (Brighton and Sussex Medical School)
Research
Health Information Quality
Pietro runs a student-selected component for second year medical students on information literacy, teaching students how to evaluate the quality of information using various learning strategies. He also uses “big data” approaches to assess the health information on the Web in terms of information quality using statistical analysis and cluster analysis of health-related websites as well as natural language analysis, in collaboration with the Cultural Informatics group at the University of Brighton.
The body responds to injury and infection both by killing the infectious agents and by tolerating the damage. It does so by producing soluble mediators called cytokines. These cytokines were originally studied for their role in the defense against cancer and infection. Later, researchers identified a role of cytokines in inflammation, and this led to the development of new drugs for chronic inflammatory diseases.
While in regenerative medicine the focus has often been in stem cell therapy, we believe we have identified a new role for cytokines in tissue repair and regeneration and established the definition of tissue-protective cytokines.
As part of the University of Brighton, Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Pietro works on characterizing the therapeutic potential of tissue-protective cytokines in several indications, their structural biology and molecular mechanism of action. This may effectively represent a way towards drug-induced regeneration and repair.
Redox regulation of immunity
Inflammation is induced as part of the innate immunity to infections, triggered by bacterial of viral molecules, or in autoimmune diseases, triggered by autoimmunity and T cell response to self. However, inflammation is also observed in injury or ischemia and we are investigating whether this is due to change in the cellular oxidoreductive metabolism (redox regulation). We have discovered how specific metabolites can act as inflammatory mediators and identified new biomarkers of redox imbalance.