Meet our team

Martin Marsala is a Professor at the Department of Anesthesiology, University of California, San Diego. Previously, he was a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Neurobiology, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Kosice, Slovakia. He holds a MD degree from the Safarik’s University of Kosice Medical School. Dr. Marsala has published more than 160 peer review papers in journals indexed in the Web of Science. He has participated in the scientific committee of several conferences and associations in USA, Japan and Europe.

Dr. Marsala’s research interests focus on : i) Spinal ischemia-induced spastic paraplegia, ii) Chronic spinal trauma-induced motor dysfunction, iii) Chronic peripheral nerve and spinal cord injury-induced neuropathic pain, iv) Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

A significant element of Dr. Marsala’s spinal injury investigations is focused on the development of gene-therapy based treatments to modulate spinal excitatory system and to suppress spinal trauma-induced spasticity and chronic pain. To address this issue, Dr.Marsala has recently developed and characterized a novel technique of spinal vector delivery into spinal subpial space. This novel technique appears to provide a significant improvement over currently available techniques in terms of highly potent spinal gene silencing or upregulation.

Dr. Marsala is widely recognized for his research accomplishments. He is frequently called upon to assist laboratories in other countries in establishing the spinal ischemia and/or chronic intrathecal microdialysis models and subpial gene delivery technique that he developed.

Dr. Marsala is also a member of clinical team which conducts a Phase I clinical trial to test the safety of human spinal stem cells after spinal grafting in chronic spinal trauma patients at UCSD.