Antonio is assistant professor at the Department of Anatomy and Neurosciences of the VUmc. In 2011 he obtained a PhD in Neuroscience defending a thesis on the role of the endocannabinoid system in nicotine addiction. After a short pre-doctoral collaboration with the Department of Neurobiology of Adaptive Processes of the Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris) and a post-doctoral experience developing a project on Maternal-immune activation models of schizophrenia he moved to the VU-CNCR (Department of Integrative Neurophysiology) where he spent 5 years as postdoctoral researcher. During his time at the CNCR Antonio worked on a project revolving around the cellular mechanisms of attentive behavior exploiting the newly developed optogenetics techniques in behaving rats. In 2017 he joined the lab of Prof. Geurts as postdoc to study the cause of MS on post-mortem human brain material. For this project he focused on the primary alterations at the level of the axo-myelinic synapse, a recently discovered form of dynamic communication between axonal processes and myelin which holds promises as a candidate to understand the pre-immune pathology of MS. In 2020 he was appointed as lecturer and in 2021 as assistant professor. Thanks its current position he can teach neuroscience to bachelor and master students and perform his experiments to unravel the mysterious cause of MS.

In his spare-time, Antonio plays jazz-manouche guitar and reads inspiring quantum physics books.

Keywords:

Neuroanatomy, Clinical Neuroscience, Multiple sclerosis, Axo-myelinic synapse.

Current techniques:

Immunohistochemistry;

Third-harmonic generator microscopy;

Confocal microscopy.

Key publications (MS):

Luchicchi A, Hart B, Frigerio I, van Dam AM, Perna L, Offerhaus HL, Stys PK, Schenk GJ, Geurts JJG. (2021) Axon-Myelin Unit Blistering as Early Event in MS Normal Appearing White Matter. Ann Neurol. 89(4):711-725.

Teo W, Caprariello AV, Morgan ML, Luchicchi A, Schenk GJ, Joseph JT, Geurts JJG, Stys PK. (2021) Nile Red fluorescence spectroscopy reports early physicochemical changes in myelin with high sensitivity Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 118(8):e2016897118

´t Hart B, Luchicchi A, Schenk GJ, Stys PK, Geurts JJG. (2021). Mechanistic underpinning of an inside-out concept for autoimmunity in multiple sclerosis. Ann. Clin. Transl. Neurol. 8(8):1709-19.

´t Hart B, Luchicchi A, Killestein J, Schenk GJ, Geurts JJG. (2021). Multiple sclerosis and drug discovery: a work of translation. eBIOmedicine, in press.

Open collaborations: VU LaserLAB – Prof. Dr. Marloes Groot

Universiteit Twente – Prof. Dr. Herman Offerhaus

VUmc MCBI – Dr. Gijs Kooij