BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Martina Absinta MD, PhD
Vita-Salute San Raffaele University
Johns Hopkins University
Milan, Italy/Baltimore (MD), USA

Dr. Martina Absinta is a neurologist with an international PhD in Molecular Medicine. She dedicated her work to ultra-high field 7T MRI–human neuropathological correlations in multiple sclerosis, and related identification of novel imaging biomarkers of chronic inflammation (with special focus on microglia-mediated and leptomeningeal inflammation). In the last few years, her work highlighted the clinical relevance of chronic inflammation and chronic active lesions in driving progression in multiple sclerosis and prompted for the planning of novel-designed MRI-based clinical trials aimed at treating such perilesional chronic inflammation. To better understand the immunological mechanism operating at the chronic active lesion edge and new therapeutic targets, she built a cellular blueprint of multiple sclerosis lesions using single-nucleus RNA sequencing and identified C1q as critical mediator of microglia activation. Her scientific work has been published in high impact scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Reviews Neurology, JCI, eLife, and JAMA Neurology.