Laura Pellegrini

Neuroscientist
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

Laura Pellegrini is a neuroscientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. She obtained a Master in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Padua, Italy. During an internship with Prof Elisa Greggio, Laura worked on a gene implicated in Parkinson’s disease. Next, Laura conducted a research project in Paris, France working on neuropathic pain at the Kremlin-Bicetre hospital. She then joined an international PhD program shared between the NIH (USA) and UCL (UK) in the laboratories of Prof. Kirsten Harvey (UCL) and Dr. Mark Cookson (NIH) and completed her degree in Neurogenetics in 2017. During the PhD she studied genetics of Parkinson’s disease using both cellular and animal models. Laura is now working on stem cell derived cerebral organoids in Dr Madeline Lancaster lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where she recently developed a new model to study the choroid plexus and the cerebrospinal fluid secretion in vitro. This model was published in Science (Pellegrini et al 2020a), has received the NC3R International Award (2021), and was recently used to study SARS-CoV-2 infection in the brain (Pellegrini et al 2020b). Laura’s research using the choroid plexus organoid model is focused on the development of this brain region in humans, on secretion of disease-related biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid and on the role of this brain barrier in pathogen and drug entry to the brain.