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Heart failure affects millions of people around the world. Yet, many patients still have few effective treatment options, especially those whose hearts become stiff and struggle to relax between beats.
In February’s Balliol Online Lecture, Professor Zaccolo will describe her research group’s discovery of a small but powerful molecular ‘brake’ inside cells affected by heart disease, and the potential for it to be released with nanometer-level precision. Achieved through study of the signalling mechanisms associated with the heart’s response to stress – often called the ‘fight or flight’ response – in turn this could allow the heart to relax properly again, offering protection from the development of heart failure.
If this discovery can be transformed successfully into a therapeutic treatment, it could represent a completely new way of helping patients beyond managing their symptoms, as current treatments do, by targeting a core mechanism of the heart that becomes altered in disease.
Professor Manuela Zaccolo, graduated in medicine at the University of Torino, Italy, and subsequently went on to pursue a career in science by spending four years as a post-doctoral researcher at the LMB, MRC, Cambridge, UK, working on protein engineering and in vitro molecular evolution. She then moved back to Italy, at the University of Padova, to work on the generation of fluorescent sensors for real time imaging of intracellular second messengers in living cells. In Padova she established her independent research group in 2001 at the Venetian Institute of Molecular Medicine with a focus on intracellular signalling.
In 2007 she moved to the University of Glasgow, where she initially held a position as a Reader and subsequently as Professor of Cell Biology.
In 2012 she joined the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford University. She is also a Fellow in Pre-Clinical Medicine at Balliol College.
Her research investigates intracellular signalling, particularly cyclic nucleotide pathways, signal compartmentalisation, and their roles in health and disease.
