Professor Piero Olliaro
Contact information
Research groups
Piero Olliaro
Professor of Poverty Related Infectious Diseases
The background to my professorship in poverty-related infectious diseases lies in the 25 years spent with the Special Programme for Research & Training in Tropical Diseases of the World Health Organization –during which I lead programmes from basic to implementation research on malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases–, including a 17-year visiting professorship with NTM and the Newton-Abraham Professorship in 2014-2015.
I have now joined ISARIC (the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium) as Director of Science. Our programme primarily aims to accelerate clinical research to prevent illness and deaths from epidemic infectious diseases. While the range of diseases covered is potentially wide, my work currently focusses primarily on plague, Lassa fever, and monkeypox.
One of the features these otherwise very diverse diseases share is the lack of established clinical research methodologies and evidence-based treatments. For instance, for plague –a disease known to have affected humans since the Neolithic and caused hundreds of million deaths– there are cheap, relatively simple treatments, but none has been established based on a randomised clinical trial, the golden standard of medical evidence. For the next three years we will be enrolling patients in a trial in rural Madagascar comparing two regimens for treating plague. If successful it will be the first evidence-based treatment for plague.
Another major area of work for me currently is antimicrobial resistance, whilst also continuing work on other poverty-related infectious diseases such as leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminthiases, and dengue.
My professional career is shaped by the principle that medical research needs to be public health-driven, and that research capacity strengthening in disease-endemic countries is an integral part of it.
Key publications
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Experimental Treatment of Ebola Virus Disease with TKM-130803: A Single-Arm Phase 2 Clinical Trial
Dunning J. et al, (2016), PLOS Medicine, 13, e1001997 - e1001997
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A four-month gatifloxacin-containing regimen for treating tuberculosis.
Merle CS. et al, (2014), The New England journal of medicine, 371, 1588 - 1598
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Designing noninferiority tuberculosis treatment trials: Identifying practical advantages for drug regimens with acceptable effectiveness.
Olliaro PL. and Vaillant M., (2019), PLoS medicine, 16
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Methodology of clinical trials aimed at assessing interventions for cutaneous leishmaniasis.
Olliaro P. et al, (2013), PLoS neglected tropical diseases, 7
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Toward Measuring Schistosoma Response to Praziquantel Treatment with Appropriate Descriptors of Egg Excretion
Olliaro PL. et al, (2015), PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 9, e0003821 - e0003821
Recent publications
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Towards harmonization of microscopy methods for malaria clinical research studies
Dhorda M. et al, (2020), Malaria Journal, 19
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Neglected tropical diseases in non-endemic countries in the era of COVID-19 pandemic: the great forgotten.
Tilli M. et al, (2020), Journal of travel medicine
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Risk stratification of patients admitted to hospital with covid-19 using the ISARIC WHO Clinical Characterisation Protocol: development and validation of the 4C Mortality Score
Knight SR. et al, (2020), BMJ, m3339 - m3339
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Usefulness of C-Reactive Protein and Other Host BioMarker Point-of-Care Tests in the Assessment of Non-Malarial Acute Febrile Illnesses: A Systematic Review with Meta-Analysis.
Bertoli G. et al, (2020), The American journal of tropical medicine and hygiene
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The time to do serosurveys for COVID-19 is now.
Peeling RW. and Olliaro PL., (2020), The Lancet. Respiratory medicine, 8, 836 - 838