Colleagues working on the project
Prof. Iacopo Olivotto is Head of the Cardiology Unit at Meyer University Children Hospital, Head of the Cardiomyopathy Service at Careggi University Hospital, and Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Florence, Italy. Over the last two decades, his main clinical and research interests have included various aspects of cardiomyopathies, with special focus on the translational investigation of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Prof. Olivotto has pioneered the design and execution of randomized clinical trials in genetic cardiomyopathies, including the seminal Explorer HCM (as the lead authors) and Sequoia HCM trials involving cardiac myosin inhibitors for symptomatic obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathies. He has co-authored over 350 papers in international, peer-reviewed journals. Prof. Olivotto is a co-founder of The Sarcomeric Human Cardiomyopathy Registry (Share), ICON (International CardiomyOpathy Network), and the Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Medical Association.
Full Professor of Physiology at the University of Florence since 1994. Currently, member designed by the Italian Ministery of University & Research in the Board of the National Institute of Cardiovascular Research (INRC); Senior Consultant Editor of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology and editorial activities for a number of additional journals. 2013-2020 Head of the Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine, University of Florence. 2018-2020 President of the Italian Physiological Society. Awarded with several grants from the European Union, Italian Ministery of University & Research, Telethon. His research activity is related to biophysical aspects of the contractile mechanism in skeletal and cardiac muscle (Excitation-Contraction Coupling, Contraction regulation and Chemo-Mechanical transduction). Micromechanics and microperfusion techniques have been developed in his lab to measure sarcomere mechanics in single myofibrils isolated from cardiac and skeletal muscle from human and animal models. These techniques have been successfully applied to investigate genetic myopathies and cardiomyopathies. He has recently contributed to the development of novel optical techniques to investigate arrhythmogenic mechanisms and E-C coupling in cardiac muscle. He is author of more than 130 scientific papers with more than 4700 quotations and an h index of 42 (WOS).
Master of Science in Medical and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology (University of Florence) and PhD in Molecular Medicine (University of Siena). Current position (2020 to date): Fixed-term Researcher at the Department of Biology, University of Florence. Lecturer of Comparative and General Physiology, School of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences, University of Florence. Research expertise: cardiac muscle excitation-contraction coupling, muscle mechanics, myofibril mechanics, electrophysiology, calcium transients, induced pluripotent stem cells and tissue engineering, genetic cardiomyopathies and muscular dystrophy modelling. Coordinator of the 20223L2C9N project and Unit PI of the GR-2021-12375403 project focused on the precision medicine in dystrophin-cardiomyopathies, 2023-2026 granted by the Italian Ministry of Health. Unit PI of the G23_63 project iPSC modeling of DMD-associated cardiomyopathy 2023-2024 granted by the Université Franco-Italienne. Previously, postdoc for the SILICOFCM European project 777204 (H2020-SC1-2017-CNECT-2) and of two Telethon Italy funded projects (GGP16191, GUP19012A).