Developed skills and lines of research

Since 2010, Roberto Plebani has been a researcher at the University “G. d’Annunzio” of Chieti-Pescara (UNICH) in the Department of Medical, Oral, and Biotechnological Sciences. He graduated in Biology and obtained a Ph.D. in Biomolecular Sciences. His research on cystic fibrosis began in 2013 when he joined the research group of Prof. Mario Romano (UNICH). He contributed to isolating endothelial cells from the lungs of CF donors and studying the role of the endothelium and inflammation in CF.

From March 2020, he spent approximately a year at the Wyss Institute (Harvard, Boston, USA), where he learned how to use organ-on-a-chip technology to reproduce human organs and tissues in vitro. This experience led to developing the first model of CF airways on a microfluidic chip. The model was designed to study inflammation, incorporating co-cultures of epithelial cells, endothelial cells, pathogens, and immune cells.

In 2022, he was invited back to Harvard by Prof. Laurence G. Rahme of the Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, USA) to train his research group on developing the airway-on-a-chip model and infecting it with Pseudomonas aeruginosa. After importing this technology to Italy, he is now the Principal Investigator of the GMSG#FFC1/2023 project.

Projects funded by FFC Ricerca as Principal Investigator or as Research Manager

GMSG#1/2023
Developing a new respiratory 3D model as an innovative strategy to study the inflammation pathology in cystic fibrosis