Michele Mascio PhD

Dr. Michele Di Mascio is the Chief of the AIDS Imaging Research Section of the Integrated Research Facility and the Chief of the Mathematical Biology Section of the Biostatistics Research Branch at the Division of Clinical Research of NIAID. He holds a degree in Electronic Engineering, an M.S. degree in Bioengineering, a degree in Biology, and an M.S. degree in Biotechnology from the University of Ancona, Italy. He earned his PhD in Pharmacology from the Mario Negri Institute in Italy. From 1999 to 2003, he was a post-doctoral research associate at the Theoretical Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, NM. He moved to NIH in 2003, where he developed the first core laboratory facility in the agency to perform in vivo Imaging studies of SIV/SHIV-infected nonhuman primates, for which he received the NIAID Special Act Award.

Michele's program made the finding of lower penetration of antiretroviral therapy in lymph nodes and spleen using animal models and in vivo imaging technology, an observation that has been later confirmed in patients. By labeling a probe to the CD4 receptor, his team has also provided the first whole-body dynamics of immune system depletion and reconstitution of nonhuman primates in the settings of SIV infection and antiretroviral therapy or following total body irradiation and hematopoietic stem cells transplantation. This imaging work has also shown that the size of the CD4 pool in the gut is much lower than previously estimated in the literature and provided the first estimate of CD4 molarity in the spleen and lymph nodes of healthy animals, through mathematical modeling of in vivo PET tracer kinetics. By using FDG-PET, his program has also provided evidence of brain inflammation through in vivo imaging in rhesus macaques infected with non-neurovirulent strains of SIV.