Gianluigi Zanusso, Medical

JAD profile

Affiliation(s): 

Department of Neurosciences; Biomedical and Motor Sciences; University of Verona

ORCID URL: 

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5199-6264

Areas of Interest: 

Prion disorders Neurodegenerative disorders

Biography & Research: 

Dr. Gianluigi Zanusso graduated cum laude in Medicine and Surgery in 1990 and obtained the board in Neurology cum laude in 1994. He received his Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience in 1999. From 1995 to 1998, he had postdoctoral training at the Department of Neuropathology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA. From 2002 to 2014, he had a position of Assistant Professor and from November 2014 of Associate Professor in Neurology at the Department of Neurological and Movement Sciences, University of Verona. Human and animal Prion disorders are my primary fields of interest with research emphasis on intravital diagnostics. In 2003, he focused his interest on the olfactory involvement in human and animal prion disorders. In 2003, in a collaborative study, he identified a novel form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy named bovine amyloidotic spongiform encephalopathy (BASE). In 2003, he also reported on the primary involvement of olfactory pathway in sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) detecting the pathological form of prion protein in olfactory neurons of sCJD affected patients. In 2014, in collaboration with Dr. Caughey at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, he set up a novel test for in vivo diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease using nasal brushing.