Identification of biomarkers associated with the onset or progression of different types of diseases.

The detection of biomarkers in body fluids has major advantages over the use of tissue markers, which most often require invasive biopsies that can be difficult to perform and potentially dangerous. Discriminating between cargoes associated with extracellular vesicles in body fluids using different approaches could provide insight into disease staging.

Cellular adaptation is the ability of cells to respond to a wide variety of external or internal stressors and include the activation of signal pathways involved in cell survival as well as the movement of cells in response to chemical and/or mechanical signals. The disregulation of the above processes is involved inmany diseases, such as chronic inflammatory diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, and their investigation can shed light on new druggable targets to prevent and/or delay diseases

Cancer treatments are nowadays quite effective in the first istance, but very often recurrent resistance phenomena arise with inauspicious prognostic outcomes. Study the adaptive cellular responses and the molecular mechanisms induced by short- and long-term treatments with anticancer drugs in different human cancer cells is useful in order to identify new potential molecular targets.