Uttaro, Antonio

Antonio D. Uttaro has a degree in Chemistry from Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales at the University of Buenos Aires. He completed his doctorate at the Campomar Foundation, now the Leloir Institute, Buenos Aires. He later did a postdoctoral fellow at the de Duve Institute in Brussels, Belgium. He is currently Principal Investigator at CONICET and head of the Molecular Protozoology laboratory. Together with his group, he studies the metabolism of lipids in parasitic protozoa, such as Trypanosoma cruzi, responsible for Chagas disease, and symbiotic or free-living organisms such as Capsaspora owczarzaki and Tetrahymena thermophila, respectively. He has validated chemotherapeutic targets and designed drugs that can be used against human parasites. He was scientific director of the first public-private agreement between CONICET and the company SANOFI, for the discovery of trypanocidal drugs. It is currently developing a system for the sustainable production of provitamin D3 for animal and human use. By introducing a novel biological model, he studies the role of lipids in the emergence of multicellularity in metazoans.