Scientific Committee

Axxam SpA, Bresso, Milan (Italy) • Ilaria Prada is Unit Manager in the Cell Biology Group at Axxam S.p.A., a Drug Discovery Company based in Milan-Italy. She obtained her MSc in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from UNIMI of Milan and, her PhD from the UNISR of Milan studying the epigenetic regulation of gliotransmission. As Postdoc fellow at the Neuroscience Institute of the Italian Research Council (IN-CNR), she expanded her research interest from intracellular vesicle expression and trafficking to inter-cellular communication in the CNS via Extracellular Vesicles (EVs). She specialized in advanced microscopy techniques working at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and at the International School for Advanced Studies-SISSA in Trieste (Italy), investigating how glia-derived EVs can affect neuronal function in health and disease, with a special focus on neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. In 2018, as Visiting Researcher at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), she investigated the role of EVs in mitochondrial remodelling during neuroinflammation with super resolution microscopy techniques. At the end of the same year, she became Associated Researcher of the IN-CNR, where she investigated the impact of microglia-derived EVs in the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease development. At the same time, she started her current career at Axxam designing and developing cell-based assays for the discovery of new the therapeutic molecules.