Tehmina Bharucha is a clinician scientist specialising in infectious diseases and microbiology. Her research focuses on neurological infections and flaviviruses.
Dr Bharucha's LSHTM MSc dissertation and UCL NIHR ACF were based at the Laos-Oxford-Mahosot Hospital Wellcome Trust Research Unit (LOMWRU) primarily developing and evaluating diagnostics (ELISA, PCR, RDTs) for Japanese encephalitis (JE). Her DPhil between Laos and Oxford investigated novel diagnostic host biomarkers of JE and scrub typhus using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry based proteomics. She received virology training at the Emerging Viruses Unit and French National Arbovirus Reference Laboratory, Marseille. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she contributed to setting-up the highly interdisciplinary Vaccine Identity Evaluation (VIE) collaboration that is still ongoing, evaluating the utility of mass spectrometry and several low-cost devices for identifying substandard and falsified (SF) vaccines. She is leading the arm of the VIE project working on rapid diagnostic tests for SF vaccines.
At the Crick, Dr Bharucha is leading a project funded by a Crick translational Idea to Innovation (i2i) grant performing high-throughput verification of diagnostic protein biomarkers of JE, as an innovative pathway towards a rapid diagnostic test. She has also recently co-ordinated a target product profile for JE diagnostics in the context of endemic flaviviruses, in collaboration with Dr Reeta Mani, head of virology at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, India, funded by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. The project involved clinicians, scientists and public health experts, as well as the World Health Organization and FIND.
