Paolo Rama

Dr Paolo Rama is the head of the Department of Eye, Cornea and Ocular Surface Diseases at the IRCCS San Raffaele Hospital in Milan and an visiting professor at the School of Specialization in Ophthalmology of the University of Milan.

After graduating from the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Padua, he specialized in ophthalmology at the University of Modena. During the academic year 1992-1993 he became a research scientist at the Wilmer Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

His areas of interest include diseases of the cornea, ocular surface and infectious diseases. As a primary surgeon, he has performed over 9,500 surgical procedures, including over 4,200 corneal transplants.

Dr. Rama carries out an extensive research activity, being a principal investigator in numerous multicenter clinical trials both in Italy and abroad, conducted in accordance with Good Clinical Practice (GCP) requirements. Throughout his career he has been interested in Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine the first demonstration of clinical application related to this growth factor. In 2010 in the same journal NEJM he published his research results on the transplantation of cultured stem cells for the treatment of corneal burns.

He has participated in national and international conferences, and his work has appeared in leading specialist journals, such as American Journal of Ophthalmology, Transplantation, Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, The Journal of Cell Biology, Current Opinion in Ophthalmology, Cornea, Eye, Ophthalmology, Clinical Genetics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Eye Research, Experimental Eye Research, Journal of Pathology, Trends in Molecular Medicine, Stem Cells и British Journal of Ophthalmology, New England Journal of Medicine.