Mauro Ferrari, president of the Houston Methodist Research Institute (Texas, USA), PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University in California in Berkeley, is the founder of biomedical nano/micro-technology, with special attention to drug delivery and applications and to other innovative therapeutic modalities.

Among the most recent results of his research group, published in the most prestigious journal Nature Biotechnology, is the creation of the first drug able to target and eliminate lung metastases in rats. The drug may change the treatment of triple negative breast cancer.

Douglas C. Wallace, professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania ‘Perelman School of Medicine’ is one of the founders of human mitochondrial genetics. He demonstrated that DNA is inherited exclusively from the mother in mitochondria, the organelles that generate the largest part of energy in the cell. These observations allowed him to use mitochondrial DNA in studies on the origin of humans: the common ancestor ‘mitochondrial Eva’ can be traced back to about 200.000 years. They allowed him also to understand that a large number of metabolic and degenerative diseases, due to their predominant character of systemic bio-energetic diseases, can be linked to genetic alterations of mitochondrial DNA.