Julio joined the Host-Pathogen Interactions Lab as a Senior Laboratory Research Scientist in September 2022. Before that, he worked as Containment Level 3 Laboratory Manager and Safety Officer for the Division of Infection and Immunity at UCL for 2 years. Prior to this role, he spent from 2013 to 2020 working at the UCL Centre for Clinical Microbiology as a Postdoctoral researcher, Research Assistant and Research Associate. The work Julio was involved with during this time spanned from the development of a hollow fibre system to mimic drug fluctuations between doses during treatment to drug characterisation. Most of the time he was involved in very successful clinical trial work evaluating the efficacy of novel drug regimens for patients with multidrug resistant (MDR) and extremely drug resistant (XDR) tuberculosis with the aim of reducing treatment duration (ReMOX, STAND, NIX, ZeNiX, SimpliTB). These phase 3 trials enrolled patients from Africa, Asia, South America and Europe and led to FDA approval of novel drug regimen for these patients.
Julio did his PhD at the University of Pavia, in Italy, under the supervision of Dr. Edda de Rossi investigating the role of an essential protein which was target to a very promising new drug, with a year spent un the University of California Berkeley, under the supervision of Dr. Lee W. Riley, focusing on the role of fatty acids as transporters of known drugs inside latent Mtb bacteria.
