Cesare Montecucco - Biography#
Cesare Montecucco is Professor of General Pathology at the University of Padua and Vice-Director of the Scuola Galileiana. He has carried out research in the Universities of Cambridge and Utrecht, the Pasteur Institute of Paris and the EMBL of Heidelberg.
His major scientific achievements are: a) the discovery of activity and targets of the clostridial neurotoxins responsible for tetanus and botulism specific, which provided the key demonstration that VAMP, SNAP-25 and syntaxin are the core apparatus of exocytosis; b) co-discovered the activity and substrate of the anthrax lethal factor and that this toxin has an immunosuppressive activity in synergism with the anthrax edema toxin; c) discovery of the mechanism of action of the vacuolating VacA cytotoxin and of the neutrophil-activating protein (HP-NAP) of H. pylori, the bacterium which colonizes the stomach of the majority of the human populations and is associated with severe pathologies including active chronic gastritis, peptic ulcers and stomach cancers. These studies strongly contributed to the formulation of the Novartis anti-H. pylori vaccine, and d) provided compelling evidence that presynaptic snake PLA2 neurotoxins act on the plasma membrane by producing lysophosphatydilcholine and fatty acid which promote exocytosis via hemifusion intermediates and calcium entry with Ca overloading and toxicity of nerve terminals. In addition, he has provided theoretical contributions on the mode of binding of clostridial neurotoxins, on the mechanism of membrane translocation of bacterial protein toxins and on the assembly of the SNARE apparatus.
He has published over three hundred articles in international scientific journals and edited three books.
Prof. Montecucco received the 1993 prize of Harvard Medical School, the 1998 prize of the Italian Consortium for the Biotechnologies, the 2000 prize of the Deutsche Gesellschat fur Hygiene und Microbiology, the 2003 prize of the Masi Foundation for the Venetian Civilization, the 2004 Feltrinelli Prize for Medicine, the 2009 Redi Award of the International Society on Toxinology and the 2009 “Paul Harris” Prize of the Rotary Club.
He has served or is serving in several Editorial Boards of scientific journals and in the Scientific Councils of major European research institutions. He is member of EMBO, Academia Europaea, German Science Academy, Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Accademia dei Lincei and of the American Academy of Microbiology.
