Andrea Pensotti

Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma | unicampus

Current studies on “personalized medicine” focus prevalently on network-based models of genome function. Since the eighties, the agenda of pharmacology discovery was dictated by aiming at discovering key, causative targets. In this perspective, genes assume a fundamental “causal” role while cells simply act as causal proxies, dispensable because th...

Objective: The inhibition of the metastatic capability of cancer cells is a pivotal aim of current anticancer strategies. We investigated herein the anti-migrating and anti-invasive properties of Zebrafish embryo extracts (SL) - an integrative formula comprising morphogenetic factors extracted from zebrafish embryos - alone or in association with...

Several studies have shown that cancer cells can be “phenotypically reversed”, thus achieving a “tumor reversion”, by losing malignant hallmarks as migrating and invasive capabilities. These findings suggest that genome activity can switch to assume a different functional configuration, i.e. a different Gene Regulatory Network pattern. Indeed, once...

The embryonic microenvironment can be viewed as a finely regulated network of cellular interactions that is critical to cell behaviour and fate determination throughout embryogenesis and beyond. Tumor cells are essentially “embryonic” in nature and for a while, it was believed that this phenomenon was peculiar to germ-cell tumors. In the last decad...

Most drugs have a natural compound ‘ancestor’ acting as the lead molecule. Classic pharmacology does not explicitly take into consideration the peculiarities of natural origin compounds, the mechanism of action of which is interpreted by the same target-specific mode of action used for synthetic molecules. Over the past few decades, this approach h...

The fall of reductionist approaches to explanation leaves biology with an unescapable challenge: how to decipher complex systems. This entails a number of very critical questions, the most basic ones being: “What do we mean by ‘complex’?” and “What is the system we should look for?” In complex systems, constraints belong to a higher level that the...

Some yet unidentified factors released by both oocyte and embryonic microenvironments demonstrated to be non-permissive for tumor development and display the remarkable ability to foster cell/tissue reprogramming, thus ultimately reversing the malignant phenotype. In the present study we observed how molecular factors extracted from Zebrafish embry...