Rossella Laurano will present on March 8, 2023, at 4:30 pm, at the Américo Amorim Auditorium, a lecture entitled "Patient-personalized wound patches: key tools to achieve successful tissue healing".
Chronic skin wounds affect more than 40 million patients globally and represent a severe growing burden for the healthcare systems, with annual costs expected to exceed $18 billions by 2025. To satisfy the huge demand for effective wound care products, different types of wound dressings have been introduced on the market during the last decades. Furthermore, thanks to the advancements achieved in biomaterial design and processing, biotechnology, imaging and electronic fields, great effort has been devoted to the research and development of innovative formulations able to actively participate to tissue healing. Nevertheless, the lack of patient personalization results in wound dressings with reduced effectiveness. In this scenario, this talk describes the engineering of ad-hoc customizable formulations aiming at solving this critical issue and improving wound dressing capability to effectively enhance tissue healing.
Rossella Laurano (born in Torino, 31.03.1989) graduated in Biomedical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin in 2014 with a Master’s thesis focused on the design of chitosan-based random and aligned nanofibrous membranes, with the aim to investigate the influence of substrate morphology on Schwann Cells adhesion and proliferation. After her Master’s Degree, Rossella worked in a startup company (Epinova Biotech srl, CEO Prof. F. Renò) as fellowship researcher focusing on thermoplastic scaffold fabrication through additive manufacturing technologies (Fused Deposition Modeling - FDM) for Tissue Engineering applications. In November 2016, Rossella moved back to Polytechnic of Turin, where, in July 2020, she obtained her Ph.D. in Bioengineering and Medical-Surgical Sciences (with honors) with a Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Stimuli-responsive poly(ether urethane) hydrogels for the design of smart patient-specific patches in skin wound treatment”. From August 2020 to December 2021, she worked as Post-Doc Researcher in the same institution in the framework of an Horizon 2020 project on the development of a bone tissue model as a preclinical evaluation tool under the supervision of Prof. G. Ciardelli. Since January 2022, she is a not-tenure researcher at Polytechnic of Turin.
Rossella’s research interests mainly focus on multi-functional biomaterial development, green functionalization procedures and biomaterial processing as bio-inks and mini-invasive delivery systems towards the engineering of patient-specific devices for wound healing and tissue-mimicking constructs as preclinical validation tools. This research activity has produced 16 research papers in international peer reviewed journals, 2 book chapters and 2 research awards from Gruppo Nazionale di Bioingegneria. In September 2022 Rossella was also awarded as Early Career Investigator-2022 from the International Society for Biofabrication as recognition for her contribution to the biofabrication field. She serves as Reviewer and Guest Editor for several international journals and as Topic Editor for Pharmaceutics journal. She has an H-index of 10 with around 300 citations (Google Scholar).
