What the press says
Press review
The prestigious Science magazine reports on the results obtained by the Gallimberti & Partners team through an interview with a crack addict patient, going by the fictional name of Luca Rossi.
“Italian physician Luigi Gallimberti, one of the leading national experts on the subject, offers him a recently published treatment by Terraneo et al, which helps the patient to reduce the use of crack without particular difficulty.”
The discovery of the new treatment for cocaine addiction was picked up by National Geographic, and front cover in over 23 languages in many countries around the world. The Italian edition reads: “The good news comes from Italy. And precisely from Padua, where a group of scholars is experimenting with a brain stimulation technique that seems to give promising results. Whoever undergoes it not only gets rid of addiction, but above all does not fall back into it. And this opens up hope for millions of people whose lives are at risk.“
In 2016, shortly after Gallimberti’s team published their results on humans affected by cocaine addiction (Terraneo et al), Karl Deisserroth, psychiatrist and bioengineer at Stanford and discoverer of optogenetics, published a paper in Nature Neuroscience which is almost entirely dedicated to commenting on these results. Deisserroth considered it to be the first example of transitional research (research that allows laboratory results on animals to be transferred to humans). He makes use of the figure we have reported and in which we see how similar the laboratory results on rats with optogenetics, are compared to those on TMS treated humans, not only as regards the activation of the same neurocircuits but also the reduction of cocaine intake.