Valentino Mercati

Valentino Mercati, the man who outlived himself. At 87, he’s focused on the future and immortality. Mercati observes and narrates his life and events from above, from the outside. He moves from Pirandello (when he was ten) to “melancholy,” from football to Burri. Every now and then, he even asks, with the irony of intelligent people, “What am I doing?!”
An enlightened, eclectic, and quick-witted mind, a problem-solving expert, he reveals himself as a “man of action rather than words.” From Aboca to UNIBIOS, Valentino Mercati’s research enters a new phase. For nearly half a century, the founder of the Sansepolcro company has built an industrial model based on the scientific use of natural substances.  Today, through Bios-Therapy Physiological Systems for Health, research aims for a broader paradigm: studying the organism as a complex system, through omics sciences, biotechnology, and new methodologies for evaluating natural matrices in search of balance and re-balance for the body and the system.
The decisive step came in 2025. On March 20, the executive agreement was signed with the Department of Medicine of the University of Perugia; on September 30, UNIBIOS was officially presented, a public-private entity intended to potentially involve all 14 departments of the University. The project also includes two clinical studies, dedicated to Mild Cognitive Impairment and knee osteoarthritis, and aims to integrate university research and industrial application.
“The university teaches the concepts, but the private company can make them operational,” explains Mercati, summarizing the philosophy of the initiative. The challenge is to move beyond the study of individual molecular targets to consider “the person and the environment as complex systems,” “from phytotherapy to omics sciences.”  Bios-Therapy is presented as a laboratory for a medicine capable of using metabolomics, proteomics, and genomics to interpret the effects of natural matrices, not just through their individual components.
This trajectory finds concrete expression in intellectual property. In 2025, Bios-Therapy, with Mercati and Jacopo Lucci as inventors, registers patents related to methods for determining the physiological action of natural products, matrix validation, and new therapeutic applications. One area also concerns a natural matrix designed to affect the microenvironment of tissues infiltrated by tumor cells. In 2026, some of these approaches are patented, consolidating research that seeks to move from theory to standardization and experimentation.
But behind inventions, discoveries, research, patents, and omic sciences lies a broader question, one that Mercati also raises in the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence: “Must new technologies be tools at the service of life,” or can they be left free to “subvert its fundamental principles in the name of ill-defined progress”? It’s a question that accompanies his research approach: the life sciences, he argues, cannot develop “in opposition to the nature of living things,” but should contribute to a better understanding of their complexity, overcoming the reductionist vision of modernity.
From this perspective, AI also changes its role: not a “lifeless intelligence” competing with natural intelligence, but a capacity developed by humans to better understand living things and re-establish a more harmonious relationship with them.  UNIBIOS thus becomes the academic branch of a broader strategy: transforming research on natural matrices and biological complexity into verifiable methodologies, patents, and therapeutic applications in the human era of the Anthropocene, the current evolutionary phase in which humanity has become capable of irreversibly modifying life on Earth, introducing substances and processes into the planet that are alien to the physiological balance of living things, capable of progressively altering its chemical, biological, genetic, and epigenetic dynamics. These transformations, a consequence of the great technological acceleration of recent centuries, can call into question the very conditions of life’s sustainability. Sustainability to which Valentino Mercato has dedicated much of his existence on this planet earth, where for him, agriculture above all allows the earth to breathe. Where water has an energetic value. Where balance and life dialogue.
A man who leaves no one indifferent. A man who makes a difference in this great school that is life.

Cecilia Sandroni