Breakfast & Science Seminar 21

Abstract

In the last two decades, major efforts of the research community have focused on developing and validating biomarkers of disease processes in patients with cognitive disturbances. Molecular imaging with Positron emission tomography (PET) represents the only biomarker able to assess the presence and the topography of pathological deposits in the brain in vivo. These include namely amyloid and tau deposits, the two pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s Disease.
This has led to a paradigm change in our understanding of the disease onset and progression, from a description mainly based on symptoms in patients, to the assessment of disease markers in cognitively normal individuals to define risk profiles.
The talk will summarize the ongoing efforts of our group in Geneva, within a network of national and international collaborations, to contribute to these progresses in clinical practice.

About the Speaker

Pr. Valentina Garibotto is division chair of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging at the University Hospitals of Geneva and associate professor at the Geneva University. She trained in Italy and Germany and then developed her clinical, research and teaching activity in Geneva. Her projects, mainly funded by the Swiss National Research foundation, the Velux Stiftung, the Schmidheiny and Aetas foundation, investigate molecular imaging, namely to guide diagnosis in neurodegenerative conditions, to discover causative and protecting factors and to support the development of novel therapeutic approaches. She has authored more than 190 peer reviewed articles (H index: 32, Web of Science) in the fields of clinical neuroimaging and nuclear medicine. She is Congress Chair Elected of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine, Chair of the Neuroimaging group of the Swiss Society of Nuclear Medicine and actively involved in a number of European initiatives developing and validating molecular imaging in cognitive disturbances.

10:00-10:30  CIBM News and Updates