I.E.ME.S.T.

Istituto Euro Mediterraneo di Scienza e Tecnologia

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Iemest

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Mission

The IEMEST (Istituto Euro-Mediterraneo di Scienza e Tecnologia) is the Institute of Science and Technology, established in 2009 in Palermo, just in the middle of the Euro-Mediterranean area.

The mission of the IEMEST is to generate, transfer, share and spread knowledge and technological innovation. Therefore the Institute is committed to endorse high-level researches by providing training for graduate and post-doc students from the Euro-Mediterranean area and supporting career improvement of researchers involved into its activities.

Moreover, in order to foster interaction and collaboration among Research Groups, which are active in different areas of Science, the Institute can also provide extensive technical and logistic support to all of the members.

IEMEST now encompass twelve Research Groups that are actually attended to grow in number just in the forthcoming years.

Topics of researches include organic, inorganic and computational chemistry; data analysis; biomedicine; pathophysiology and modern therapies for human diseases; plant pathology; urbanistic.

The Advisory Body, compound of internationally distinguished experts, guarantees prominent standards of personnel appointments and research work.

The IEMEST also encourage Scientists to cooperate with several Research Institutes either in Italy or abroad, by organizing conferences, seminars and scientific meetings.

With such intents, the Institute is therefore involved in fundraising activities, either from public or from private sources, as well as from funding agencies. So far the National Academy for Politics (Accademia Nazionale della Politica) has been the principal financier, since the initial contribution covered running costs for the first two years.

Newsflash

Una nuova scoperta sulla patogenesi della Rettocolite Ulcerosa e sul Morbo di Crohn

The purpose of this work was to determine in colon mucosa of Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) in relapse: a) the levels of the chaperonins Hsp60 and Hsp10; b) the quantity of inflammatory cells. Both Hsp60 and Hsp10, as well as inflammatory cells, occurred in the mucosa of CD and UC but not in NC. Hsp60 and Hsp10 co-localised to epithelial cells of mucosal glands but not always in connective tissue cells of lamina propria, where only Hsp60 or, less often, Hsp10 was found. Since chaperonins are key factors in the activation of the immune system leading to inflammation, we propose that they play a central role in the pathogenesis of the two diseases, which, consequently, ought to be studied as chaperonopathies.

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New discovery: A protein secreted by tumor cells may become a new diagnostic and therapeutic target (published in PLoS ONE)

New discovery: A protein secreted by tumor cells may become a new diagnostic and therapeutic target (published in PLoS ONE)

Levels of Hsp60 in tumors are often at high levels. Moreover, Hsp60 may be found in sera of patients with tumor. Data presented in this work suggest that Hsp60 release from tumor cells is the result of an active secretion mechanism and, since extracellular release of the chaperone was demonstrated in all tumor cell lines investigated, our observations most likely reflect a general physiological phenomenon, occurring in many tumors. Finally, we showed that Hsp60 is present in tumor cell membrane. These results may have diagnostic and prognostic, as well as therapeutic significance.

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New discovery: A new scaffold to differentiate cardiac precursors in myocardiocytes (published in Journal of Cellular Physiology)

In the last few years, a major goal of cardiac research has been to drive stem cell differentiation to replace damaged myocardium and several research groups have attempted to differentiate potential cardiac stem cells (CSCs). In the present study, we isolated a pool of small proliferating and fibroblast-like cells from adult rat myocardium. The phenotype of these cells was assessed and the characterized cells were cultured in a collagen I/OPLA scaffold with horse serum to obtain fine myocardial differentiation. The results open new biomedical and therapeutical scenarios.

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New discovery: Chlamydia Trachomatis infection consequences: autoimmune diseases or anticancer immunity? (published in PLoS Pathogens)

New discovery: Chlamydia Trachomatis infection consequences: autoimmune diseases or anticancer immunity? (published in PLoS Pathogens)

Chlamydia trachomatis (CT) infection is one of the most common causes of reproductive tract diseases and infertility. This article focuses on the potential pathogenetic effect of Hsp60 production from Chlamydia trachomatis that shares various antigenic determinants with the human counterpart. At the same time, we remark that pre-tumor and tumor cells expressing Hsp60 on their surface can be destroyed with participation of the anti-Hsp60 antibody, thus stopping cancer progression before it is even noticed by the patient or physician.

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