The morbidity and mortality associated with a number of infectious or non-infectious inflammatory diseases is variable according
to the gender. While males are in general more susceptible to infection-induced acute inflammatory diseases, females are more
vulnerable to chronic inflammatory diseases. This cannot be fully attributed to sexual hormones as this sexually dimorphic
susceptibility is observed in pre-pubertal infants as well. We have reported a number of pediatric investigations showing that in chronic
diseases such as cystic fibrosis and asthma, the inflammatory symptoms were more severe in girls than in boys. The objective of our
research is to depict the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying the sexual dimorphism of the immune inflammatory response
with the aim to define a new molecular markers hat could be used in diagnosis and prognosis and also to pave the way for potential
gender based therapy. To achieve our goal, we perform comparative studies in males and females suffering from acute or chronic
inflammatory diseases by looking at i) biomarkers and cellular signaling involved in the inflammatory process in innate cells like
neutrophils, monocytes and endothelial cells ii) X chromosome-linked molecular signatures such as genes involved in immunity and
microRNAs that potentially regulate the inflammation. To test our hypothesis, we perform also in vitro and in vivo studies in animal
models of infection and inflammation