CV Science

Cristine Alves da Costa PhD Pharmacy Biochemistry, Toxicology

Course and current status

Cristine Alves da Costa (CAC) is graduated in Pharmacy-Biochemistry and has obtained and a PhD in Toxicology at the University of Sao Paulo, USP, Brazil. In 1998 she made a post doctoral  stage at the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology  (IPMC), Valbonne, France, where she has got a permanent position as a Senior Research Associate (CR1) at INSERM in 2004. Actually she is Director of Research and leads the team ALZPARK (Physiopathology of Alzheimeir's and Parkinson's diseases) at IPMC. Her main interest concerns the role of Parkinson's disease associated genes in the etiology of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's disease and brain tumors.
CAC has authored more than 70 articles (research ID G-8075-2011), is reviewer of several journals and is editor in chief of Parkinson's disease and editorial board member of several open access journals like Oncogene, Current Neuropharmacology, Frontier's in Neuroscience.

Scientific summary

CAC team's research interests include Parkinson’s molecular and cell biology, apoptosis, autophagy, ER stress. We are particularly interested in the study of the role Parkinson’s disease associated proteins in the etiology of the specific dopaminergic cell death observed in Parkinson's disease. Moreover several of our projects aim the delineation of specific and common signaling cascades that ultimately lead to cell death in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. This transversal experimental approach aims the establishment of common molecular denominators and by consequence the identification of potential therapeutic targets. Moreover, given the inverse correlation between neurodegenerative disorders and cancer we are also interested in the role of familial PD gene products in the development of glioblastomas.