Valter Sergo

Education
Ph.D.	Italian Ministry of University, Italy
M.S.	Ohio State University, USA
“LAUREA” B.S.+ M.S.	University of Trieste, Italy

Positions
2018-to date	Adjunct professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Macau, China
2002-to date	Promoted (2002) and then appointed (2005) Full Professor of Chemistry, University of Trieste, Italy
2001-2002	Associate professor of Materials Science, University of Trieste, Italy
2001	Visiting professor, Technical University of Dresden, Germany
1998-2001	Associate professor of Materials Science, “La Sapienza” University, Rome, Italy
1995 1996	Research Associate, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan
1993	Research Associate, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA
1990-1998	Assistant professor of Applied Chemistry, University of Trieste, Italy

Research Interests

Presently, the main research activity of Prof. Sergo concerns the use of Raman vibrational spectroscopy for applications in Health and Life Sciences. Within this field, a long lasting effort is devoted to use Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy for quantitative determination of chemotherapeutic drugs circulating in the patients metabolic system. The final purpose is to arrive at a cheap, timely, drug quantification for achieving Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM); so far encouraging results have been achieved for Methotrexate and Imatinib. Another area of investigation concerns the use of Raman SERS for large scale cancer screening: in this case the approach is to build a chemometric model from a large number of known samples of Plasma/serum from patients, and to place a new sample/patients in a population determined by Principal Component Analysis(Linear Discriminant Analysis (or other chemometric tools). So far the approach, very cheap and fast, is being tested on breast cancer and prosthate cancer. In the past efforts have been dedicated to mapping of histological sections for comparing the morphological with the biochemical information (lung diseases, coeliac diseases, for example).

Representative Publications

Fornasaro, S., Marta, S.D., Rabusin, M., Bonifacio, A., Sergo, V. Toward SERS-based point-of-care approaches for therapeutic drug monitoring: The case of methotrexate (2016) Faraday Discussions, 187, pp. 485-499. Bonifacio, A., Cervo, S., Sergo, V. Label-free surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy of biofluids: Fundamental aspects and diagnostic applications (2015) Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 407 (27), pp. 8265-8277. Cervo, S., Mansutti, E., Mistro, G.D., Spizzo, R., Colombatti, A., Steffan, A., Sergo, V., Bonifacio, A. SERS analysis of serum for detection of early and locally advanced breast cancer (2015) Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 407 (24), pp. 7503-7509. Bonifacio, A., Dalla Marta, S., Spizzo, R., Cervo, S., Steffan, A., Colombatti, A., Sergo, V. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy of blood plasma and serum using Ag and Au nanoparticles: A systematic study (2014) Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 406 (9-10), pp. 2355-2365.

Research Grants

CENMAT (center of Excellence for nanostructured Materials and Surfaces), Italian Ministry of Research and University (250.000 Euro). LONGLIFE (EU project NMP), responsible of Research Unit, Research European Agency (320.000 euro) BINASP (EU Infrastucture Project), responsible of Research Unit, Research European Agency (200.000 euro) AIRC 5 x 1000 research Unit responsible, Italian Agency for Cancer Research (210.000 euro).

Patents
Patent 102016000114276: “Substrate to carry out analysis and procedure to produce it”

Awards

The recipient (ex aequo) of the best publication award for the best publication of the years from the Japanese Ceramic Society, 1996 The recipient (ex aequo) of the award for the best contribution to the Congress of European Societies for Biomaterials, 2005 The recipient (ex aequo) of the award for the best contribution to the XIII European Conference on the Spectroscopy of Biological Molecules”, 2009 Awared an ERASMUS MUNDUS competitive grant for a joint program with the University of Macau, 2017

Professional Activities

Member of the National Panel of experts Consultant of the Ministry of University and Research for joint Industrial/academic program Consultant for international lawsuits concerning patents in the field of Materials Science President of the Administration Board of BIC Incubatori FVG, an industrial technological incubator for spin-offs and start-ups (2014-2016) Member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Trieste