Francesco Moccia

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT FRANCESCO MOCCIA

Awarded a BSc in 1995 from the University of Pavia and a PhD in Physiology in from the University of Turin, followed by a Postdoctoral training at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven and at the Zoological Station \"Anton Dohrn\", Naples, where I was appointed Junior Staff Scientist in 2003. I came back to Academy in 2006 as Appointed Professor of Biology and Physiology at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, University of Molise, while keeping a research fellowship at the University of Naples \"Federico II\" untile late 2008- Assistant Professor of Physiology at the Department of Biology and Biotechnology “Lazzaro Spallanzani”, University of Pavia, Italy- Member of the Directive Board of the Italian Society of Cardiovascular Research and of the Editorial Board of ISRN Physiology and Springer Plus- Reviewer for Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Cardiovascular Research, Journal of Membrane Biology, Journal of Cellular Physiology. Journal of Vascular Research and Frontiers in Bioscience. My primary areas of research interest are in vascular endothelium and in calcium signalling. I was the first one to describe a Ca2+ current activated by NAADP to trigger the embryonic development in echinoderms. Afterwards, I moved back to vascular physiology and I am currently investigating the role of TRP channels and store-operated Ca2+ entry (Stim1 and Orai1) in endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) isolated from both peripheral blood and umibilica cord blood. In particular, I am trying to understand how utilizing Ca2+ signalling to improve the outcome of EPCs-based regenerative medicine. We are also studying the remodeling of the Ca2+ toolkit in EPCs from human cancer (kidney and breast) patients. We aim at targeting Ca2+ channels as a novel approach to design more powerful anti-angiogenic therapies. Our research exploits a variety of approaches: Ca2+ imaging and patch-clamp, Western Blotting and immunofluorescence, qRT-PCR and gene silencing.