Feltri’s Legacy on Full Display At Neuroscience Research Day

By Dirk Hoffman

The uplifting atmosphere stemmed from the decision to dedicate the 2024 event to the memory of the late M. Laura Feltri, MD, a cherished member of the Jacobs School community who passed away from cancer at the age of 60 in December 2023.

An internationally renowned pioneer in the study and treatment of myelin diseases in the nervous system, Feltri was a SUNY Distinguished Professor of biochemistry and neurology in the Jacobs School and director of UB’s Institute for Myelin and Glia Exploration.

Her research focused on multiple sclerosis; Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which affects the peripheral nerves; and Krabbe leukodystrophy, a rare, fatal neurological disease that afflicts newborns.

With major funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Feltri made numerous seminal discoveries in her field, including the creation of the first mutagenesis tool for studying Schwann cell development and the signaling mechanisms that control myelination.

In collaboration with her husband, Lawrence Wrabetz, MD, she pioneered the use of transgenic animals to model neurological diseases and develop new therapies. Feltri was a faculty member and head of the NeuroGlia Unit at the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan, Italy, before joining the UB faculty in 2011. 

Several of Feltri’s colleagues and mentees spoke at the research event, and as they reflected on Feltri and her legacy, it became evident that in addition to being a brilliant scientist, she was also a truly caring and supportive friend to many.

During welcoming remarks, Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, UB’s vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School, said Feltri “was a visionary leader whose many, many contributions are deeply appreciated here at the Jacobs School and across the world and is deeply missed.”

“Dr. Feltri really energized the next generation. She would be heartened to see all the future scientists here in the room,” she said.

Fraser J. Sim, PhD, director of the Jacobs School’s neuroscience program, organized the research day event along with David Dietz, PhD, professor and chair of pharmacology and toxicology; Maureen Milligan, Liz Marshall Metcalfe, Marah Salyer and Shannon Brown.

Sim said Feltri was much more than a brilliant researcher.

“When I was a junior faculty member joining UB as the only neurobiologist, I remember meeting Laura and Larry,” he said. “And Laura, with her very grounded nature, and despite being this world renowned-expert, was very kind. She helped me and so many others find their footing here at UB.”

Sim said Feltri’s ability to mentor was especially unique.

“She had a way of offering constructive feedback that wasn’t just helpful, it was transformative to the way you thought about the science that you were doing,” he said. “But she also never minced words. Her critiques were always delivered with care and thoughtfulness and that is something I have always tried to emulate as a principal investigator myself.”

Mark R. O’Brian, PhD, professor and chair of biochemistry, shared an anecdote that provided a glimpse into Feltri’s kindheartedness.

He noted that he once ran into Feltri at the Buffalo airport. It turned out both were taking the same flight to New York City. She was headed to Milan and he was traveling to Oregon.

“As we waited to board, I was telling her, for probably the nth time, that my maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants and that Italian was my mother’s first language and that I regretted not having learned any Italian,” he said.

“So, all of a sudden Laura started speaking Italian to me, and she is translating, and then says a little more and is translating,” O’Brian said. “Mercifully, she did not give me a quiz. I have to say that I did not learn much Italian that day, but I did learn from Laura a couple of things.”

“One is that kindness is a superpower and she had it,” he noted. O’Brian added that as he looked at a photograph of Feltri that was displayed in the lecture hall, he was touched by it and said “it reminds me that my reservoir of tears has not been depleted and I think it is the cost of friendship that I think is a price I am certainly willing to pay.”

Maureen Milligan, a research administrator at UB’s Institute for Myelin and Glia Exploration, worked with Feltri for 13 years and helped Wrabetz and Feltri set up the institute (then known as the Hunter James Kelly Research Institute) when they came to Buffalo from Italy.

“Her lab was large and extremely productive. At one point she had three NIH R01 grants running at the same time,” she said. “She also had many other large and small grants from other governmental and private funders. Since I managed all this funding, I know how productive she was.”

Milligan noted the research day event organizers had created a fundraiser for the Doctors Without Borders organization in honor of Feltri.

“Laura once told me that she and Larry had seriously considered joining Doctors Without Borders before they started a family and their careers in Italy,” she said. “It is for this reason it is incredibly special that this conference has organized a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders. It was something that was very close to her heart.”

The event’s invited speakers included Feltri’s former colleagues and mentees.

Michael Weaver, MD, PhD, spent five years working on his doctoral degree with Feltri as a student in the Jacobs School’s MD-PhD Program.

“During that time, I studied an esoteric protein family called the striatins and their role in Schwann cell myelination,” he said.

Weaver currently works in the lab of cornea specialist Sangita P. Patel, MD, PhD, assistant professor of ophthalmology, studying an eye disease named Fuchs Endothelial Corneal Dystrophy.

“Similar to my work elsewhere, the focus is on extracellular matrix (ECM) biology,” he says.

Weaver says he was always struck by Feltri’s focus on humanity in her research.

“Laura truly and deeply understood and appreciated that everyone is a human being, not just a student, not just a technician, not just a scientist,” he said. “She treated you as the full thing that you are. I remember her telling me one time, ‘the best thing about science is the people,’ and she said that honestly.”

“As much as she intensely focused on and pursued the science, she never forgot the human aspects of it.”

Weaver’s talk, titled “Laminin Receptors in Peripheral Nervous System Myelination,” was a broad and historical perspective on much of Feltri’s work over the course of three decades, looking at ECM molecules and their receptors in Schwann cells. He also tied it in with how they are regulated to include findings from his projects on striatins.

Yannick Poitelon, PhD, worked with Feltri for 18 months in Italy before coming to Buffalo to help set up her lab. He worked with her for another six years in Buffalo and is now an associate professor of neuroscience and experimental therapeutics and co-leader of the Myelin Laboratory at the Albany Medical College.

“Laura was my mentor, but she was also my friend,” he said. “She was also the person who I was looking up to when I was thinking about science, thinking about mentoring and how to manage the life of a scientist and the work-life balance.”

Poitelon’s talk, titled “The Forces Regulating Peripheral Nerve Biology,” focused on how mechanical forces can modulate peripheral myelination.

“It is a topic that was initiated in Laura’s lab. When I left, I continued the project independently and she continued too, side-by-side,” he said. “My talk was about what we did together, and what I did alone, and I brought it back around by presenting what she was doing and where the field might go in the future on that specific topic.”

Gustavo Della Flora Nunes, PhD, who was also mentored by Feltri at UB and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, gave a talk titled “Incomplete Remyelination Via Endogenous or Therapeutically Enhanced Oligodendrogenesis is Sufficient to Recover Neuronal Function.”

Judith B. Grinspan, PhD, research professor of neurology at Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about myelin issues in HIV in her talk titled “Two Important Players in Schwann Cell and Oligodendrocyte Differentiation.” 

“In 1990, I had just started as faculty at Penn and Laura was a postdoc in a molecular biology lab, and I had a cell biology lab on the same topic,” she said. “We basically started working together to exchange techniques. They taught me what they knew, I taught them what I knew. Laura was a great person to work with. There was great harmony in that lab.”

“We just became great friends. It was more of a personal relationship than a scientific one,” Grinspan said. “Laura was very unassuming. She was fairly quiet. She was just a normal person. She loved her children. She liked to cook. She liked to ski and swim.”

Kelly Monk, PhD, professor and co-director of the Vollum Institute in Portland, Oregon, gave the keynote presentation titled “Molecular and Genetic Dissection of Myelinating Glial Cell Biology.”

Monk and Feltri collaborated on a number of studies related to Schwann cell biology.

Monk said she always considered Feltri to be her “cool big sister in science” and looked up to her both personally and professionally.

The research day event featured 54 poster presentations during two separate sessions organized by Thomas J. Covey, PhD, assistant professor of neurology.

Three Best Poster Awards were given out. The winners were:

• “Disease-Related Variants at GluN1 Y647 Impair NMDA Receptor Gating Kinetics,” by Samantha Rose Schwarz, a doctoral student in the neuroscience program who works in the lab of Gabriela K. Popescu, PhD, professor of biochemistry.
  
• “Exploring Developmental and Age-Related Pathologies in the Brain Using the Nrmt1^-/- Mouse Model,” by James P. Catlin, PhD, a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Christine E. Schaner Tooley, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry
  
• “Identifying the Role of SoxC Factors in Retinal Ganglion Cell (RGC) Development,” by Sandy Enriquez, a doctoral student in the lab of Xiuqian Mu, MD, PhD, professor of ophthalmology, who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Biochemistry.