Dr. Fabio Moda, senior researcher at the Carlo Besta Neurological Institute, has been working in the field of neurodegenerative dementias associated with protein misfolding, in particular, prion-related (infectious agent) encephalopathies (brain damage disorders), Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, since 2007. He earned his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Milano-Bicocca in 2011 and then moved to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (USA) where he led a project (the results of which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2014) developing an important diagnostic test which showed that the urine of individuals affected by the variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease contains infectious prion particles. He is now developing ultrasensitive diagnostic tests for the detection of disease-specific biomarkers present in peripheral tissues, including the olfactory (brain region the detects smell) mucosa, of those suffering from different forms of neurodegenerative diseases, including frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's and Lewy Body Dementia.