Scientific Research for Women: Foundation for Women’s Wellness (FWW) awards Ri.MED researcher Riccardo Gottardi
The Foundation for Women’s Wellness (FWW) is a nonprofit public charity dedicated to improving women’s health by raising support for innovative for research and education. Over the past twenty years, FWW has supported gender scientific research for 20 years, granted scholarships to promising researchers, focused on defeating typical women’s pathologies targeting their health concerns, such as osteoporosis and breast cancer, and hormones’ role during pregnancy and menopause.
The 2016 Iris Klarman Women’s Health Fellowship Award was appointed to Riccardo Gottardi, PhD, a fifth year post-doc fellow and member of the scientific team of the Ri.MED Foundation, for his innovative study in the field of orthopedic regenerative medicine. This study, funded by Ri.MED and conducted at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, examines gender differences in osteoarthritis and joint damage, specifically the effect of sex hormones on cartilage in menopausal women, a category with a very high incidence of the disease.
Osteoarthritis causes a progressive erosion of the joint cartilage, the tissue covering the bone extremities of the joints. After menopause, the chances of women being at risk of developing this degenerative disease are twice the ones of men. Several studies show that the high incidence is due to decreased hormone levels after menopause. One of the main obstacles for understanding the mechanisms of osteoarthritis is that bone and cartilage interact and cannot be studied separately. However, up to date, hormone replacement therapies have only focused on improving bone health without intervening on the cartilage.
Dr. Gottardi has a different point of view: “My hypothesis is that results of the current therapies depend on the fact that estrogen and progesterone concentrations vary over time during the menstrual cycle and they cyclically repeat every 28 days, whereas with hormone replacement therapies the estrogen (or the estrogen and progesterone) is continuously administrated with no variation. My goal is to identify which combinations of hormone concentrations are effective to protecting the cartilage.”
In order to do that, Dr. Gottardi’s team developed an in vitro model, already patented, to generate engineered cartilage: “My in vitro model closely replicates the conditions observed in vivo in human beings, and allows to grow human osteochondral tissues for extensive periods of time in controlled environments. Also, it obviates the need to carry out on animals that, in addition, have a very different hormone cycle compared to humans.” This research will provide new guidelines for hormone replacement therapies that do not damage the cartilage, and identify the hormone mechanisms that affect osteoarthritis. Once these mechanisms are defined it will be possible to use them as new therapeutic targets.
Alessandro Padova, director general of Ri.MED Foundation: “I’m extremely proud of the success of our researchers. This new international award confirms Ri.MED’s role as an institution of innovation in research programs strongly focused on clinical practice, which promise to dramatically improve the quality of life of patients affected with pathologies for which no remedies are currently available.”
Riccardo Gottardi graduated in Physics at the University of Pisa in 2003, curriculum of Applied Physics (Medical Physics), with a thesis on the characterization of bacteriorhodopsin. From 2004 to 2007 he worked for his PhD between the Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genoa (supervisor: Prof. Roberto Raiteri) and the Biozentrum in Basel, Switzerland (supervisors: Prof. Ueli Aebi and dr. Martin Stolz) as part of a collaborative project. His doctoral thesis was centered on the validation of the atomic force microscope as a tool for the micro- and nanomechanics characterization of articular cartilage for diagnostic purposes. After his PhD he continued to work at the University of Genoa developing new methods for studying the structural and micro-and nanomechanical properties of cells and tissues.
Since 2011 is Ri.MED supported scientist at the University of Pittsburgh in the Center for Cellular and Molecular Engineering at the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine (Supervisor: dr. Rocky S. Tuan) and in the Little Laboratories at the School of Engineering (supervisor: dr. Steven R. Little). Riccardo will be principal investigator at the CBRB about to be build