83169 - Clinical Biochemistry

Academic Year 2024/2025

  • Docente: Luca Morandi
  • Credits: 1
  • SSD: BIO/12
  • Language: English
  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: Single cycle degree programme (LMCU) in Medicine and Surgery (cod. 9210)

Learning outcomes

Describe the clinical biochemistry skills and techniques to evaluate the functional state of organs and tissues, using liquid and solid samples from patients.

Course contents

Course contents:

  • Course introduction
  • Laboratory medicine: the pre-analytical, analytical and post-analytical phases
  • Performance of a laboratory test: sensitivity, specificity, predicting values, ROC curves, clinical validation.
  • In Vitro Diagnostic Medical Device Regulation (IVDR)
  • Personalized medicine: new diagnostic and bioinformatic approaches that provide understanding of the molecular basis of disease and stratify related patients
  • The assessment of diagnostic, prognostic and predictive tests with examples from new assays based on Next Generation and nanopore Sequencing
  • Glioma diagnostics following the WHO 2021: a paradigm for an accurate classification following the rule of clinical reasoning
  • Epigenetics: Principles and Practice
  • The use of genetic and epigenetic biomarkers in oncology, aging and neurological disorders
  • Tumor heterogeneity and single cell sequencing
  • Liquid biopsy to monitor the evolution of the cancer genome through a minimally invasive technique
  • Cerebrospinal fluid analysis in the central nervous system diseases
  • Bioinformatic tools in Clinical molecular biology and next generation DNA sequencing

Readings/Bibliography

Lecture slides and scientific literature will be provided (see IOL platform)

Teaching methods

Frontal teaching

Assessment methods

Final evaluation will be performed by means of a joint test on all topics covered in the integrated course. The test will be based on 40 multiple choice questions (4 available answers, only one is correct). In general, at least 5 questions from each different teaching module will be included in the test. The exam is passed (score 18) when at least 24 questions are correctly answered. When all the questions are answered correctly the final score will be 30, with honours.

Teaching tools

Lecture slides will be made available.

www.quizizz.com platform to verify learning activities at the end of each lecture

Office hours

See the website of Luca Morandi