WSTAP-2025

Dr. Carola Torazza is an Associate Researcher at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Genoa (UNIGE, Italy), since 2024. She got her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology and her master’s degree in medical and pharmaceutical biotechnology at UNIGE in 2014 and 2016 respectively. In 2017 she got a postgraduate fellowship at University Vita-Salute San Raffaele (Milan, Italy) where she worked for 9 months. She got her double doctorate in Experimental Medicine (International Curriculum of Pharmacology and Toxicology) at UNIGE and Maastricht University (Netherlands) in 2021 and she worked as postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Pharmacy (UNIGE) for two more years. Currently, Dr. Carola Torazza's research focuses on the study of the central nervous system with a particular interest in the mechanisms and possible therapeutic approaches in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a rapidly worsening neurodegenerative disease with lethal outcome for which there is no effective cure today. In these fields, her past and present research projects concern the study of i) the release of neurotransmitters, with particular interest in glutamate, in animals subjected to chronic stress and treated pharmacologically with ketamine; ii) mechanisms related to the functions of glial cells (i.e. astrocytes and microglia) involved in ALS; iii) bioenergetic aspects in neuronal and non-neuronal cells in ALS; iv) the in-vivo evaluation of pharmacological treatments for the prevention/treatment of ALS in mouse models of the disease.