As part of the international cooperation and activities of our faculty, a distinguished guest, Dr. Maria Jelinić, from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, visited us on June 24, 2024. She gave a talk on “Developing a new preclinical model of metabolic syndrome for testing pharmacotherapies and Beond” as a part of the Scientific Forum to our Dental Medicine students as well as our residents, postdoctoral fellows and the rest of the faculty and non-teaching staff.
Maria joined La Trobe in 2018 as a joint NHMRC and National Heart Foundation Early Career Research Fellow. She is now a Lecturer in Human Physiology and leads the "Hypertension and Diabetes" research theme at La Trobe University's Cardiovascular Biology and Disease Research Centre.
Since joining La Trobe, Maria's research programme has focused on the development of a new mouse model of obesity. This model is the first in the world that not only accurately reflects the typical diet of obese patients, but also induces severe obesity, metabolic dysfunction and end organ damage in both sexes. Maria specialises in the use of single-cell techniques such as single-cell RNA sequencing, flow cytometry and spatial transcriptomics.
Given that hypertension, obesity and diabetes are the leading causes of cardiovascular disease, Dr. Jelinić has focused her postdoctoral research on elucidating the mechanisms that trigger cardiac, vascular and renal complications in cardiometabolic diseases. She is investigating novel inflammatory mechanisms that trigger renal and vascular complications in these disease states, which she spoke about during the lecture itself. Dr. Jelinić specialises in using pharmacological interventions and genetic modifications in rodent models of cardiovascular disease to test novel therapeutic strategies that target immune cells to reduce end organ damage in such diseases.
In addition, Dr. Jelinić's stay with our faculty provides an opportunity for a professional and scientific connection with La Trobe University which is the Australian leader in health education and ranked first in Australia for environmental conservation and food safety.
Many thanks to all those who responded to the lecture, expressed their interest in topics of professional value and supported our guest with their presence. We sincerely hope that we were also good hosts and look forward to future collaboration with Dr. Jelinić and her research group.
