Dr. Alice Gualerzi has been granted by Fondazione Umberto Veronesi with a 12-month-long Post-doctoral Fellowship to work on a project entitled: INNOVATIVE NON-INVASIVE RAMAN APPROACH FOR EARLY DIAGNOSIS OF SKIN CANCER.

Taking advantage of her background in morphology and previous research experience in the field of epithelial basic research, Dr. Gualerzi is going to work on the application of Raman spectroscopy (RS) to whole skin analysis in order to facilitate cancer diagnosis, disease characterization, and lesion recognition.

A label-free non-destructive diagnostic approach, like RS, will help in establishing a correct and precise classification of the different skin cancer lesions which can be extensively different in morphology, invasiveness, dangerousness, prognosis and treatment responses. RS can represent an accurate early diagnosis method to distinguish different types of skin cancers thanks to its compatibility with water-containing materials (like viable tissues), its non-invasiveness (a low power laser is enough to obtain good quality Raman measurements on biological tissues), and its relative rapidity considering that measurements can be performed without sample preparation.

The main aim of this project is to highlight the relevant differences between Raman spectra from normal and pathological skin samples. Data will be compared to histopathological findings to characterize the skin cancer chemical fingerprint and to deepen the correlation between spectral differences and histological observation. Secondly, a RS database will be created to facilitate skin cancer diagnosis. Surface single point measurements will be performed on ex-vivo normal and cancerous human skin, to identify the changes of the major constituents (lipids, amide, DNA, melanin) across the epidermis and dermis.