Insect-Borne Diseases in the 21st Century

Marcello Nicoletti is a full-time professor of Pharmaceutical Biology and Pharmacognosy at the Environmental Biology Department of the University Sapienza of Rome, where he also earned his degrees in Chemistry (1974) and Industrial Chemistry (1976). Dr. Nicoletti completed a Post-doctorate at the University of Cambridge (England), working in Biochemistry of Amino Acids. At first, Dr. Nicoletti focused his research on the study of plants utilized in local traditional medicine. He has spent several years traveling in South America and Africa, focusing initially on Curare alkaloids, and later on antimalarial alkaloids and glycosides to treat benign prostatic hypertrophy. He specialized in the chemical, nutritional, and biological study of plant-active constituents. Dr. Nicoletti is author of over 300 papers in international scientific journals as well as several books. More than 100 of his most recent papers and book chapters have been dedicated to the control of insect-borne diseases using new natural substances and plant-derived products. Such products were created through nanotechnology applications developed by the collaboration with several international research groups. Furthermore, he is co-editor of the journal Natural Products Research. Recently, Dr. Nicoletti's interests have turned to Meristemotherapy, a medical approach based on utilization of juvenile plant tissues to treat several pathologies. He wrote a book on this topic alongside Dr. F. Piterà called Gemmotherapy, Scientific foundations of a Modern Meristemotherapy, which has been translated into several languages.