Marco
Bassetto

My undergraduate training was carried out mostly in Italy at the University of Padova, where I succeeded in accessing the Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technologies program through a competitive call and obtained my Pharm.D. and MSc in Chemistry. As an undergraduate, I actively pursued initiatives to enhance my studies by working at the bench. Specifically, I secured the Mario Lorenzini grant that supported my work in the laboratory of synthetic chemistry of Dr. Adriana Chilin at the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Padova. Later, I secured an Erasmus grant that supported my Master’s Thesis work in the laboratory of synthetic chemistry of Dr. José Antonio Palenzuela López at the University of La Laguna in Spain. After becoming a board-certified pharmacist, I secured a Marie Curie Fellowship to pursue my Ph.D. in the R&D department of OZ Biosciences with the aim of developing ocular drug delivery systems for the treatment of retinal diseases.

As part of my Ph.D. program, I had the opportunity to travel to the labs of established European leaders in the field of ophthalmology and apply my drug delivery systems to ex vivo and in vivo models of retinal diseases. These collaborations lasted several months and allowed me to work in the laboratories of Drs. Marius Ueffing (Tubingen, Germany), Hélène Dollfus (Strasbourg, France), and Arto Urtti (Kuopio, Finland). Next, I continued with a postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Kiser at the Brunson Center for Translational Vision Research (CTVR) of the University of California, Irvine. Together, we developed new small drug molecules for treating an inherited and juvenile form of macular degeneration through visual cycle modulation. Herein, I am expanding the use of our visual cycle modulators to deliver other small drugs, specifically non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, for treating dry age-related macular degeneration.