Dr. Pietro Spitali

Pietro Spitali is currently assistant professor at the Human Genetics Department of the Leiden University Medical Center. He has worked in the field of muscular dystrophies and especially Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) since 2003. His graduate work focused on the pre-clinical development of antisense oligonucleotides mediated exon skipping in DMD. After obtaining his PhD in Ferrara in 2010 he moved to the DMD genetic therapy group headed by Dr. Annemieke Aartsma-Rus at the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, first as post-doc researcher and since 2014 as assistant professor. His work focuses on the identification of biomarkers in patients affected by muscular dystrophies and especially Duchenne. This involves single and multi-omics studies on several sample matrices in muscle, blood and urine as well as mechanistic studies on the RNA processing in muscle diseases.

Pietro has authored 30 publications  and 2 book chapters. He has obtained research grant funding from amongst others the Prinses Beatrix Spierfonds, the Association Française contre les Myopathies (AFM) and the Dutch Duchenne Parent Project. He was involved in the FP7 funded Bio-NMD, SCOPE-DMD and NeurOmics projects. He coordinates an AFM funded consortium to identify biomarkers in patients affected by several forms of muscular dystrophy. He has been a member of COST Action BM1207 (www.exonskipping.eu); he recently organized and coordinated a workshop for this Action on the harmonization of exon skipping quantification across laboratories. Pietro is an active reviewer for prestigious journals and funding agencies.