Department of Pharmacy, Universita degli Studi di Genova, Genoa, Italy;
Paola Fossa got her PhD in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1992 at University of Genoa, Italy. Senior Researcher since 1997, she has spent some training periods at Department of Chemistry, Leiden University, Dipartimento Farmaco-Chimico, University of Bari and Institut fur Pharmazeutische Chemie, Dusseldorf University, acquiring skills and experience in computational chemistry and drug design. She is Associate Professor since 2005 at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Genoa. Her main research activity concerns the application of computational strategies to medicinal chemistry issues, mainly rational design and identification of CFTR modulators, ligands for GPCRs receptors (serotoninergic, cannabinoid and trace amine receptors), PDE4 inhibitors. She has published about 110 papers and is referee for several medicinal chemistry journals. She has been responsible of different research projects funded by University of Genova and Italian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Institute of Biomedical Technologies-CNR, Segrate, Italy;
Pasqualina D'Ursi is a researcher at the Institute for Biomedical Technologies (ITB) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). She received a BS degree in Biological Science and a Phd in Molecular Medicine at the University of Milan. Her research activity is focused on understanding the relationship between the molecular structural of a protein and its function. This information is necessary to provide predictions on the effects of disease-causing mutations and positively help drug-design. Computational methods such as molecular modeling, docking, molecular dynamics and bioinformatics have been applied in her research to analyze protein-ligand interactions for drug discovery (Cystic Fibrosis, Covid19, HIV and Endocrine Disruptors) and the study of the structure-function relationship of mutated proteins involved in the coagulation cascade and rare diseases.