My name is Luigi Fiore, and I was born in Palermo on October 9, 1998. I joined the Ri.MED Foundation as a  PhD student in January 2023. I obtained a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and a master’s degree in Medical Biotechnology and Molecular Medicine from the University of Palermo. During my master’s program, I completed an internship at the Cell Biology laboratories associated with the Department of Biomedicine, Neuroscience, and Advanced Diagnostics (Bi.ND). I focused on studying the therapeutic potential of extracellular vesicles derived from plants, which was also the subject of my thesis. The project had two main objectives: testing the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of extracellular vesicles isolated from lemon juice on human fibroblasts and developing an innovative drug delivery system using extracellular vesicles derived from tangerine juice.

Following the completion of my master’s degree, I began my PhD program at the Ri.MED Foundation in collaboration with the University of Messina. My PhD project focuses on understanding cellular death as a response to viral infections in human macrophages. Specifically, our experimental model involves stimulating human monocyte-derived macrophages (hMDMs) with viral mimetics such as Poly I:C. The project aims to investigate the signaling pathways leading to cell death following this stimulation and identify the receptors involved in binding Poly I:C and activating signal transduction pathways that lead to caspase recruitment.