Luca Bonfanti

Associate Professor

Luca Bonfanti, DVM, PhD, graduated (with honors) in 1987 at the School of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Turin, Italy. After a PhD in Functional Neuroanatomy and a postdoc at the Bordeaux University, he was appointed Assistant Professor in 1994 and Associate Professor in 2000 at the Turin University. He is now Professor of Veterinary Anatomy at the Department of Veterinary Sciences, and group leader at the Neuroscience Institute Cavalieri-Ottolenghi (NICO), a research center on brain repair. Since 1992 his research activity is devoted to study brain structural plasticity with particular reference to adult neurogenesis. In 2011 he was Visiting Professor at Northeastern University (Boston); he is receiving editor in the peer reviewed journal Frontiers in Neurogenesis.

1books edited

1chapters authored

Latest work with IntechOpen by Luca Bonfanti

Twenty years after the discovery of neural stem cells, the question whether the central nervous system can be considered among regenerative tissues is still open. On one side, deep characterization of neural stem and progenitor cells, their niches, and their progeny in brain neurogenic sites overtly showed that new neurons can be generated in the brain of adult mammals, including humans. On the other side, many problems arise when stem cells encounter the mature brain parenchyma, still hampering the development of efficacious therapeutic approaches with endogenous or exogenously-delivered neural stem cells. This book tries to make the point on these extremely promising, yet unresolved, issues.

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