Luchessi André Ducati

In 2007, I graduated with a BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences from a leading university in Brazil, and in 2011 I obtained my PhD also in Pharmaceutical Sciences, from the same university. Currently, I am Assistant Professor in a Federal University in Brazil. In my doctoral thesis, I performed a pharmacogenomic study of antiplatelet agents in percutaneous coronary angioplasty. My expertise in molecular biology is related to human genomic research, such as genotyping technologies, mRNA and miRNA expression analysis, in vitro cell assays, and data analysis for discovery of how genomic variations can influence disease phenotypes and their potential uses as biomarkers. Recently, I joined the most important Institute for Genomic Medicine in USA as a Visiting Researcher to identify new biomarkers for complex diseases using human iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes cells. To date, I have published 35 peer-reviewed manuscripts, 31 in internationally recognized journals and four in Brazilian journals. Of the 35 manuscripts, 28 of them were published after I obtained my doctorate (2011). My training and publications demonstrate that I have a strong background in molecular biology and the ability to conduct human genetics research to develop diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of complex diseases. I was the first author on the publication describing my thesis work in pharmacogenomics, which was published in Clinical Chimica Acta in 2013. My thesis work demonstrated that therapeutic responsiveness to acetylsalicylic acid and clopidogrel are correlated with a mRNA profile of around 350 genes in white blood cells. In fact, this was the first report in the literature that showed the pharmacological response of antiplatelet drugs is, at least in part, associated with gene expression variation. In 2017, a second publication of my thesis work in Basic Clinical Pharmacology Toxicology showed that the expression of the ABCC3 gene can be affected by the pharmacokinetic propriety of clopidogrel. Indeed, we demonstrated that the increased expression of ABCC3 correlates with the reverse transport pathway of the drug. I used the findings of my thesis work to write a grant as an individual principal investigator and obtained financial support from CNPq (Universal/2014). These funds have been used to support two master student’s projects and have resulted in two publications, for which I was the senior author. In the first publication, we used a new integrative analysis in combination with publically available genomic databases, and demonstrated that the differential expression of miRNAs in platelets, and of their target mRNAs, can be associated with variability in platelet reactivity and drug-induced toxicity. The second publication was based on an in silico systematic biology approach, and demonstrated an alternative approach to elucidate the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases. Recently, these studies were presented in two important congress: the Brazilian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (Natal, Brazil, 2016), and 69th Annual Scientific Meeting & Clinical Lab Exop of American Association of Clinical Chemistry (San Diego, USA, 2017).