Citizenship Italy Fields Chemistry Alma mater University of Padua | Nationality Italian Children Two (Carlo, Emma) Field Chemistry | |
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Born Maurizio Prato
October 11, 1953 (age 63)
Lecce, Italy ( 1953-10-11 ) Known for Chemistry of nanocarbons Spouse Elisabetta Schiavon (m. 1999) Institutions University of Trieste, Donostia / San Sebastián | ||
Maurizio Prato (born in Lecce October 11, 1953), is an Italian Organic Chemist, who is best known for his work on the functionalization of carbon nanostructures, including fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphene. He developed a series of organic reactions that make these materials more biocompatible, less or even non toxic, amenable to further functionalization, and easier to manipulate. He is Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Trieste and Research Professor at CIC BiomaGUNE in San Sebastián, Spain.
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Scientific Research
Maurizio Prato is an organic chemist, equally fluent in materials science and nanomedicine. From the beginning of his career, Maurizio Prato used his physical organic and synthetic chemistry backgrounds to expand the horizons of the chemical reactivity of fullerenes.
In 1993, together with M. Maggini and G. Scorrano, he published the first paper on the azomethine ylide cycloaddition to C60, which resulted to be a very useful reaction of functionalization of fullerenes.
In 2002, he extended the same reaction to carbon nanotubes. The reaction is very versatile, consisting in the condensation of an alpha-amino acid and an aldehyde to generate a reactive 1,3-dipole that then adds to a double bond of C60 or CNT, giving a pyrrolidine ring fused to the carbon skeleton. Many alpha-amino acids and aldehydes can be used very efficiently, for a total control of the functionalization process. This addition, later called Prato reaction, was adapted from a very old reaction scheme, originally reported by Huisgen and then developed by many others. Prato and his colleagues were the first to apply it to fullerenes.
Because of its versatility and applicability, this approach paved the way to the use of fullerenes and carbon nanotubes in important applications in fields as different as photovoltaics and drug delivery. In particular, Maurizio Prato, in a longstanding collaboration, initially with Alberto Bianco and later with Kostas Kostarelos, demonstrated the utility of carbon nanotubes to serve as efficient scaffolds for the delivery of vaccines and drugs. Carbon nanotubes are very well suited to act as drug carriers, because of their extraordinary capability to cross cell membranes. This result has thrown open a very active area of research, which explores the applications of CNT in biology and medicine.
In another interesting technological development of functionalized carbon nanotubes, Prato, in collaboration with neurophysiologist Laura Ballerini at the University of Trieste, has used carbon nanotubes as substrates for neuronal growth. Carbon nanotubes integrate in an incredible way with nerve cells, leading to a boost in the spontaneous activity of the neurons. These researchers also found that two isolated slices of spinal cord can restart communicating through a bridge of carbon nanotubes. The implications of this work is that in a (hopefully) not too distant future, carbon nanotubes might be used to repair or replace the function of damaged, altered and severed neurons and neuronal tissue.
The scientific career of Maurizio Prato indicates a remarkable evolution from “pure” physical organic chemistry to bio-nanotechnology/materials. He has explored new synthetic protocols, new analytical methods, to discover new materials tearing down the traditional barriers between Chemistry and other disciplines such as Physics, Biology and Medicine. His philosophy has very frequently been transmitted to the members of his group, who were able to grow in a “multilingual” laboratory. Of the numerous students and postdoctoral fellows that have worked in the his laboratory, the majority of which financially supported by EU RTN or Marie-Curie networks, many have a current successful academic career.