The Generative Brain

Dulbecco Telethon Laboratory of Prions and Amyloids, CIBIO, University of Trento

This is an academic research laboratory in the Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology (CIBIO) of the University of Trento, at the Povo science campus. It is led by Emiliano Biasini, associate professor, and works on protein folding and on small molecules that lower the cellular prion protein (PrP), mainly for prion diseases. It began as a group funded by the Dulbecco Telethon Institute careers programme from 2015. Its main prion lines are the PPI-FIT drug discovery programme, whose lead compound SM875 lowers PrP in cells, and a cell based screen called LIPS, which picked out cardiac glycosides as PrP lowering drugs and led to an approved observational study called Brainheart. Funders named in public sources are Fondazione Telethon, the Autonomous Province of Trento, the CJD Foundation and the Italian PRIN 2022 programme. All of its prion work is preclinical; no drug from the lab has entered a human treatment trial.

Key facts

  • The lab sits in CIBIO, a University of Trento department with about 49 labs in four research areas and 8 core facilities, at Via Sommarive 9 in Povo, Trento.
  • The lab head is Emiliano Biasini, associate professor at Trento since 2015; the lab page lists 15 further members, including a lab manager, a technician, postdoctoral fellows, a Marie Curie fellow and doctoral and master students.
  • A December 2014 news report said Biasini would set up a group at Trento from 2015 with five years of Dulbecco Telethon Institute funding to seek therapies for prion diseases and genetic Alzheimer disease; that programme pays salary and research costs for five years at a chosen Italian institute.
  • Papers from 2017 and 2019 give the affiliation as the Dulbecco Telethon Laboratory of Prions and Amyloids and report cell screens for compounds that block prion replication and mutant PrP toxicity or move PrP off the cell surface, funded by Telethon grant TCP14009; Mario Negri researchers co-authored them.
  • In July 2019 the lab and the Trento physics department, with INFN, published a computer model of prion structure and replication in PLOS Pathogens (sponsored university news).
  • In January 2021 the lab published PPI-FIT, a method that uses simulations of how PrP folds to find compounds that bind a short lived folding intermediate so that the cell degrades the protein; the lead SM875 lowered PrP and slowed prion replication in cells, with some cell toxicity. The paper names Telethon TCP14009 and Telethon with the Autonomous Province of Trento TCP13007, and lists co-authors from Hamburg, Perugia, Santiago de Compostela and Padova.
  • The PPI-FIT technology is licensed to Sibylla Biotech, a company the lab head co-founded; the 2021 paper says the company excludes prion diseases, so the prion programme stays in the academic lab.
  • In 2021 the lab won a CJD Foundation grant, listed under the Sherry Maxwell Fabian Memorial Grant, titled Pharmacological Degraders for the Cellular Prion Protein; its final report says more than 40 SM875 analogues were made and tested and the programme was at hit to lead stage.
  • The lab runs LIPS, a fluorescence cell assay that reads out PrP levels; a screen of more than 2,000 drugs found that cardiac glycosides strongly lower PrP, and the local ethics committee approved an observational study, Brainheart, to check whether this happens in people. No result is public.
  • The lab page lists a PRIN 2022 grant from the Italian research ministry programme, protocol 2022PP8WNZ, on non-canonical small molecule degraders of the prion protein, with the lab head as unit leader; no dates or amount are given.
  • In December 2024 a Trento project led by the lab head, to improve anti-prion compounds and test them in animal models of prion disease, was funded in the fourth Telethon multi round call, one of two CIBIO projects sharing 390,000 euro (sponsored university news).
  • In 2025 the lab reported that only the (R) mirror image form of SM875 lowers PrP and that it also carries the toxicity, and a PRION 2025 abstract reported PrP lowering in healthy mice after spleen injection (abstract seen only as search excerpts).
  • Its 2025 and 2026 output also includes co-authorship on a Fukuoka and Moscow anti-prion compound screen, a TIGEM led paper linking PrP to copper toxicity in Wilson disease, a review chapter on prion therapies and a 2026 review on prion drug discovery with Santiago de Compostela.
  • Listed academic collaborators include the Istituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome, the Mario Negri Institute, TIGEM, CNR, Perugia, Milano-Bicocca, Santiago de Compostela and Yale; industrial ones include Sibylla Biotech, Gate Bioscience and SpacePharma, with which it runs a prion protein crystallisation project on the International Space Station (Zeprion-2).
  • On 26 November 2022 the lab head, with a Fondazione Telethon officer, opened an update day for prion patient associations at the University of Trento; he also sits on the scientific committee of the Italian fatal familial insomnia family association AFIFF.

Timeline

  1. 2014News report that a Dulbecco Telethon funded prion therapy group will start at Trento in 2015.
  2. 2015Group starts at CIBIO; lab head becomes associate professor at Trento.
  3. 2017First screening paper under the Dulbecco Telethon Laboratory of Prions and Amyloids name.
  4. 2019Prion replication model published in PLOS Pathogens, with the Trento physics group.
  5. 2019Paper on compounds that remove PrP from the cell surface.
  6. 2021CJD Foundation grant for PrP degraders awarded.
  7. 2021PPI-FIT and SM875 published in Communications Biology.
  8. 2022Update day for prion patient associations at the University of Trento.
  9. 2023CJD Foundation final report posted (date from upload path).
  10. 2024Telethon fourth multi round call funds the Trento anti-prion compound project.
  11. 2025Wilson disease copper toxicity paper with TIGEM published.
  12. 2025SM875 enantiomer paper published.
  13. 2025Co-authored anti-prion compound screen published in Scientific Reports.
  14. 2026Review on prion drug discovery with Santiago de Compostela published.
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