Biography

Ilaria Iannucci is a young research fellow at the Emerging Bacterial Pathogens Unit, IRCCS San Raffaele, Milan. She holds an MSc in Biotechnology and Medical Biology from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University. Her research focuses on antimicrobial resistance and genomic surveillance of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, with expertise in Next Generation Sequencing including Illumina and Oxford Nanopore platforms. Her work includes DNA extraction, phenotypic/molecular drug susceptibility testing, phylogenetic analysis of MTBC strains, evaluation of novel diagnostic assays. Committed to global health, she supports TB drug resistance detection in international settings through fieldwork and training, contributing to interdisciplinary efforts in infectious disease control.

Expertise

TB Diagnostics
Public Health

Key Impacts

Assessing the performance of culture-free next generation sequencing for drug-resistant TB detection

Culture-free dWGS allowed successful DR interpretation for 74% specimens. However, tNGS showed lower LoD (10 vs >100 total gc of dWGS) and stronger correlation with bacillary load. Selecting between the two approaches based on bacillary loads would enable effective direct diagnostic sequencing from patient samples.

Source: Conference 2024

Research Summaries

PAPER
New culture-free sequencing speeds TB resistance and transmission detection
20 Jan 2026