Thursday, December 18th 2025, 2:30 pm
CNR Conference Room, Area della Ricerca NA1, via P. Castellino, 111, Naples
“A Notch too far: Tregs in tissue inflammation and autoimmunity”
Raffaele De Palma
Unit of Clinical Immunology and Translational Medicine,
IRCCS Ospedale Policlinico San Martino,
and Department of Internal Medicine, University of Genova, Italy
You may choose to participate either:
– In person, by joining us at the venue
– Online, by accessing the seminar through the following link:
For any questions or further information, please contact us at
mariarosaria.coscia@cnr.it
We look forward to your participation.
Best regards,
The Organizing Committee
Abstract
Immune system has a critical role in acute and chronic human diseases. Lack of adequate and/or appropriate immune responses determine both susceptibility to infections and chronic inflammation. The understanding of immune responses is a key step to improve clinical and therapeutic handling of diseases, a complex task since individual Immune Systems are widely different due to gene differences and interaction of individuals with infections and environmental factors. Immune responses take places in the organs orchestrated by tissue mechanisms. Foxp3+Regulatory T (TR) cells play a requisite role in peripheral immunological tolerance. Their function must be continually tuned to allow tissue-specific protective immune responses while preventing chronic inflammation and autoimmunity. Recently, it has been shown that several mechanisms may subvert tissue TR function to promote disease. For instance, given Notch receptors specifically reprogram TRcells to “license” tissue inflammatory responses. Therefore, it is likely that tissue TR cell plasticity fulfills a physiological role by negatively regulating TR suppressive and repair programs to ensure optimal immune responses to pathogens. When misdirected, such plasticity leads to immune dysregulation, inflammation and autoimmunity. Chronic tissue inflammatory diseases, including those triggered by pathogens or in the context of autoimmune and degenerative diseases represent a huge medical and societal burden. Their initiation and persistence in the face of stringent immunoregulatory constraints, most notably those imposed by regulatory T (TR) cells, implies disease-associated mechanisms that disable or subvert those constraints, whose characterization can lead to precision therapies tailored on the single patient.
De Palma’s CV
Graduated in Medicine and Surgery, Specialist in Clinical Immunology and Allergy, PhD in Experimental Medicine-Clinical Immunology. Post-Doctoral Fellow in Immunogenetics (BRI, MCW) in Milwaukee, USA, two years co-head of the Experimental Medicine Lab in Pavia at Maugeri, Visiting Scientist at Karolinska, the Basel Institute of Immunology, Division of Immunology-Harvard. Researcher and then Associate Professor in Internal Medicine in Naples (Vanvitelli). Since 2019, Full Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Genova, where he directs the Division of Clinical Immunology and the Laboratory of Clinical and Experimental Immunology. Always engaged in the characterization of immune responses in animal models and in humans.