Dr Ana Cubas Atienzar

Biography

Ana is a Lecturer in Diagnostics of Infectious Diseases at the Department of Tropical Disease Biology, where she leads diagnostic test development and evaluation activities in the Centres for Drugs and Diagnostics Research and Tuberculosis Research at LSTM. Her lab focuses on the discovery of new biomarker targets for diagnostic applications, the development of novel diagnostic assays and the evaluation of diagnostics. Ana’s work focuses on point-of-care diagnostics that are accessible and affordable to implement in low-resource settings to improve diagnostics in communities in need. She has an interest in emerging and priority diseases that have the potential to cause epidemics and outbreaks, and tuberculosis.

Ana holds a degree in Veterinary Medicine from the University of Murcia, Spain and a PhD in molecular epidemiology and diagnostics from Salford University, UK. Before joining LSTM, Ana worked as a Research Fellow at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, where she worked on molecular characterisation and the development of novel diagnostic methods for zoonotic viral and bacterial diseases.

Research interests

Ana’s research at LSTM mainly focuses on emerging infectious diseases. She is the lead of the diagnostics programmes at LSTM, working on the development of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) and molecular point-of-care (POC) tests and the evaluation and implementation of these for Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) and Rift Valley Fever (RVFV). She is the Chief-Investigator of the DETECT trial platform: DEvelopmenT of a rapid diagnostic tEsts to identify Crimean-congo haemorrhagic fever aT the point-of-care where Ana’s team is developing CCHF RDTs and evaluating in Turkey and Iraq. She is the PI of a programme on the development of novel POC diagnostics for RVF, a collaboration between LSTM, The Institut Pasteur Dakar in Senegal and in-country partners from Rwanda and Kenya. She has obtained recent funding to develop novel diagnostics for Oropuche and Marburg.

Ana is also working on the discovery of novel diagnostic targets in non-traditional sample types to improve tuberculosis diagnostics in vulnerable groups that struggle to produce sputum and she is also a co-investigator in the Start4All consortium, a global tuberculosis research programme across seven high-burden countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Viet Nam), aiming to implement and evaluate novel combinations of tuberculosis diagnostics.

She leads diagnostic clinical and analytical evaluations under the Pandemic Thread Program of the Foundation of Innovative Diagnostics (FIND) and the development of POC diagnostics for Emerging Diseases.

Ana is one of the Directors of the Diagnostic Platform of iiCON and part of the Steering Committees of The Pandemic Institute in Liverpool and iiDiagnostics, a SME spin-out of LSTM.

Teaching

Ana co-directs the Research Methods in Tropical Disease Biology module (TROP705). She lectures across a variety of modules on diagnostics, infectious diseases and public health, including in LIFE340, TROP720 and DTMH modules. She has supervised more than 10 BSc, MSc and PhD students.