Member Snapshot
Name: Francesca di Cara, PhD
Affiliation: Dalhousie University
Location: Halifax, Canada
Current research topic: Gut-brain axis, inflammation, and neurodegeneration
DCoP Member since: March 19, 2026
Research Summary
Dr. Francesca di Cara (@dicara) studies peroxisomal metabolism in the intestinal epithelial cells and how its alteration during aging or under environmental stress (e.g., high-fat diet) leads to inflammation. Francesca and her team are trying to define:
- which metabolic changes caused by peroxisomal dysfunction lead to inflammatory signaling and what signaling they inhibit or trigger,
- how this signaling fights to maintain homeostasis and a functional epithelium,
- and how failures in this maintenance may lead to systemic inflammation and detrimental alterations of the gut-brain axis.
Her team at Dalhousie University also studies how changes in the gut-brain axis following peroxisomal metabolic alterations are linked to the onset of idiopathic Parkinson disease.
Challenges, Wins, and Opportunities for Collaboration
What do you find to be the greatest data-related obstacles / challenges to your work and research?
The lack of intestinal biopsies from small intestine and colon from PD patients.
Are there areas of your work where you think DCoP members could provide assistance / feedback to help overcome an issue or further your work?
Advocation for the importance of intestinal biopsy collection as part of the PPMI project would be very helpful. Also, help in the interpretation of certain data, such as the age-related changes in neuropeptide expression in PD patients and their correlation with disease severity in a sex-specific fashion, would help to strengthen the direction our research is taking.
In the last year or two, have you experienced any significant ‘wins’ in your work and research that you would like to share (e.g., scientific breakthroughs, grant awards, major milestones completed, etc.)?
We are excited about the discovery we made in aging Drosophila with reduced peroxisomal activity in the intestinal epithelial cells. We found overexpression and secretion of a neuropeptide that is produced in response to metabolic damage and accumulates in the serum and brain of the flies. Functional analyses reveal that this peptide leads to inflammation in the brain and triggers signaling that causes dopaminergic-neuron loss, resulting in locomotion defects and memory reduction in the aging animals.
Interestingly, analyses of the PPMI data that reported proteomics of PD patients revealed that, as in our animal models, males have a higher level of the functional ortholog peptide in their plasma at early disease stages. The high level of the peptide also correlates with gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms in some patients. This was very exciting! We received funds from the CIHR grant agency in Canada to continue this project in the murine system and we applied to a MJFF grant (results not available yet); we hope that if we get this award, we can move our discovery more towards clinics and explore the translational possibilities with the help of the MJFF community.
Do you have any opportunities for collaboration in your lab or within your research project that we can highlight?
We would like to have more plasma samples from PD cohorts, as well as from prodromal and at-risk populations, to further confirm our findings and explore more markers we are validating that are linked to idiopathic PD. We also would like help with the collection of intestinal biopsies from patient cohorts.
Thank you to @dicara for participating in our first community member highlight! If you would like your work to be highlighted in future newsletters, please reach out to @gginnan.