Camilla Rodrigues

Dr. Camilla Rodrigues is a Senior consultant microbiologist and the Chair of the Infection Control Committee at the P.D. Hinduja Hospital and Medical Research Centre, a tertiary private healthcare centre in central Mumbai, India that extends state-of-the-art medical care in all branches of medicine and surgery. The microbiology laboratory is accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL). Her laboratory is accredited for liquid culture, first-line drug susceptibility testing (DST), second-line DST, and line probe assay by the National Mycobacteriology Accreditation System of the Central Tuberculosis Division (CTD), Ministry of Health, Government of India. Due to the large volume of referred cases in Mumbai, tuberculosis (TB) is a focused area of diagnostic research in the microbiology section. The TB lab at Hinduja Hospital serves as a large referral laboratory in Mumbai and receives more than 32,000 samples annually for TB culture.

Due to its role as a tertiary referral care centre, Hinduja Hospital sees a particularly high volume of TB patients who have not responded to previous therapy, resulting in high rates of MDR-TB patients. In addition, She maintains an academic appointment to train MSc and PhD candidates at the University of Mumbai, taking a lead role in establishing the section of Infectious Disease and obtaining recognition for Infectious Diseases as a post-doctoral fellowship by the National Board Examinations, New Delhi. Hinduja Hospital is now a recognized training centre of this clinical Fellowship of the National Board (FNB) in Infectious Diseases.

She has decades of experience running a high-volume TB laboratory, training microbiologists, doctoral candidates, and clinicians. Her research has resulted in 311 publications and focused on TB diagnostic tests including optimization of culture techniques to improve yield, detection of resistance to first-line TB drugs, and molecular assays for rapid detection of XDR-TB-associated genetic mutations and the ReSeqTB Consortium. She has a long history of international partnerships, including NIH and the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation funded projects. Her collaborators have included the University of California San Diego, Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, Foundation Merieux, Cepheid, and academic groups from Johns Hopkins University, Oxford University, McGill University, Imperial College London. Her work has led to the implementation of diagnostic tests for TB including LPA, pyrosequencing and the evaluation of strain-relatedness by spoligotyping, and MIRU-VNTR. She also runs a Hinduja Hospital initiative called Treat to Cure MDR TB program where the state of the art Diagnostic tests as Pyrosequencing and MGIT DSTs help to guide individualised regimen for DR TB cases and the program provides full support for diagnostics, treatment and counselling.