Medical University of South Carolina

Team Leader

About MUSC

Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) is the state’s only comprehensive academic health system founded in 1824. MUSC is dedicated to delivering the highest-quality research and patient care while training generations of science and health care leaders. Dr. del Monte’s Laboratory focuses on basic cardiac muscle pathophysiology and translational research to understand the pathogenesis of heart failure as proteinopathy like Alzheimer’s disease and for the discovery of novel therapies. The lab utilizes an interdisciplinary approach with experimental and clinical physiology, molecular biology and imaging as well as biophysical and structural-chemistry approaches. Dr. del Monte is a clinician-scientist, Director of the MUSC Cardiovascular Biobank and Director of the Christie’s Heart & Brain Program. The biobank collects and provides high quality human biospecimens to support research all-over the world.  The Christie Heart & Brain Program, funded with the philanthropic gift of the Christie family, represents the first program to study the pathogenic mechanisms linking Heart Failure and Alzheimer’s Disease and to care for patients with both diseases in the first interdisciplinary specialized clinic.

Dr. del Monte is MD from the University of Rome and PhD from the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London (UK). She was Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston where she developed her USA career over 20 years. She is currently also an Associate Professor at the University of Bologna where she develops studies on the effect of physical energies in the process of proteostasis. She participates to the MARKOPOLO consortium to study the effect of noise in initiating, accelerating or worsening Alzheimer’s Cardiomyopathy given her expertise on the field of cardiac proteinopathy and the effect of environmental modifiable factors combined with genetic predisposition on the susceptibility, severity, progression and clinical course of non-communicable diseases due to the recent plummet in climate changes.