Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

The Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the Italian National Research Council (IsIB), founded in 2001, consists of about 50 collaborators, including 34 CNR staff, mostly research scientists and technicians. Research is carried out in close contact with italian and international excellence centers. IsIB is geographically distributed between Padova, Milan and Rome. 

The Padova-Pisa group includes two teams with 25 years of consolidated experience in modelling in diabetes and metabolism. The Padova team (Andrea Mari, Andrea Tura & Roberto Bizzotto, Institute of Biomedical Engineering of the National Research Council) has developed a number of model-based approaches widely used in diabetes research. The Pisa team (Ele Ferrannini & Andrea Natali, Department of Internal Medicine of the University of Pisa; Amalia Gastaldelli, Institute of Clinical Physiology of the National Research Council) has an outstanding reputation in clinical diabetes; Ele Ferrannini is past-President of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes. Both teams are involved in large collaborative projects (e.g. EU-FP5 RISC project, IMI-SUMMIT project) and have established collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry.

The group's expertise is around model-based assessment of metabolic parameters and drug efficacy; Glucose homeostasis models; Insulin sensitivity; Beta-cell function; Diabetes; Obesity; Metabolic syndrome; Tracer kinetics; Simulation; Parameter estimation; MATLAB & SIMULINK.

The group also brings into the project its broad knowledge on the model-based quantitative study of pathophysiology in the area of diabetes and metabolism. This expertise from clinical diabetes & metabolism complements that in clinical pharmacology & PK/PD in diabetes.